It turns out the inflation wave of 2021–23 was a really big deal, according to the mother of American opinion polling. 

A long-running Gallup poll found the percentage of U.S. adults who anticipate a high-quality life within the next five years slumped to 59.2%, its lowest share since the organization began asking this question nearly two decades ago. 

The poll—based on data collected over four quarterly measurements in 2025 among 22,125 U.S. adults—revealed a notable decline in sentiment, measuring a 3.5-percentage-point drop-off from 2024. 

“If you look at the optimism metric for future life, that really came down a lot from 2021 to 2023, and that corresponds really closely with the worst of the inflation crisis,” Dan Witters, research director of the Gallup national health and well-being index, told Fortune. “The economic pressures of being able to afford things like food and fuel and gas and health care—that really can have a deleterious effect.”

The percent of Americans anticipating a high-quality life in 2021 hit 67.3%. But after a few years of high inflation, that number fell to 61.9% in 2023.

Moreover, the study found the number of Americans who rate both their current and future lives high enough to be characterized as “thriving” dropped to 48%, down more than 11 points from a high in June 2021, and the sixth-lowest rating out of all 176 measurements taken since 2008. The last time the rating dropped below its current level was in April 2020, the month after the COVID pandemic first hit the U.S.

The results come as a confluence of factors have impeded the American way of life. Over the last several years, inflation, domestic conflict, economic uncertainty, and political upheaval have made many Americans feel more pessimistic about the future. Americans’ confidence in finding a job has hit rock-bottom, and homeownership has grown increasingly unattainable for younger generations. All this as the expanding K-shaped economy is leaving millions of Americans in the dust. 

“Their optimism for the future is now eroding,” Witters said. “[It’s] eroding at a rate that’s kind of significantly greater than what we find with how they evaluate their current lives.”

Inflation and politics spurring pessimism

Yet even as inflation cooled in 2024, dropping to 2.5% year over year that August, Americans remained pessimistic. Witters attributed that persistent pessimism to political partisanship.

“In 2025, the steep drop among Democrats coupled with no change this time among Republicans don’t cancel each other out. And so you have that real net negative in the overall U.S. total.”

Witters mentions it’s common for life ratings to swing dramatically among political parties when control of the White House changes. Still, expectations for a high-quality life dropped off significantly among Democrats, a 7.6 percentage point decline in future life ratings from 2024. For context, Republicans’ sentiment dropped 5.9 percentage points after Biden assumed office in 2021 while Democrats’ optimism rose 4.4 points. 

Yet even among Republicans, optimism rose just 0.9 points last year. And Independents’ optimism fell 1.5 points.

“I think that to the extent that that kind of partisanship can kind of influence the overall national numbers, clearly that’s happening here,” Witters said.

Gallup asked respondents to choose a step on a ladder numbered from zero to 10 that best represented their quality of life, where zero indicated the worst possible life and 10 indicated the best possible life.

By race and ethnicity, Hispanic adults saw the steepest drop-off in optimism from the year prior, falling six points. White adults also saw a notable decline of 4.6 points, while sentiment among Black Americans fell 2.2 points.