A new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll finds that the share of people who say they have a good chance of improving their standard of living fell to 25%, a record low in surveys dating to 1987. More than three-quarters said they lack confidence that life for the next generation will be better than their own, the poll found.
Nearly 70% of people said they believe the American dream—that if you work hard, you will get ahead—no longer holds true or never did, the highest level in nearly 15 years of surveys.
Republicans in the survey were less pessimistic than Democrats, reflecting the longstanding trend that the party holding the White House has a rosier view of the economy. An index that combined six poll questions found that 55% of Republicans, as well as 90% of Democrats, held a negative view of prospects for themselves and their children.
The discontent reaches across demographic lines. By large majorities, both women and men held a pessimistic view in the combined questions. So did both younger and older adults, those with and without a college degree and respondents with more than $100,000 in household income, as well as those with less.
“It sort of saddens me,” said Neale Mahoney, a Stanford University economics professor who has studied economic sentiment. “I think one of our superpowers as a country is our relentless optimism…. It is the fuel for entrepreneurship and other exceptional achievements.”
The poll found a somewhat brightening view of the current economy. Some 44% rated the economy as excellent or good, up from 38% a year ago, though still a smaller share than the 56% who now view the economy as not good or poor.
And yet many people in the survey, as well as in interviews, said they felt a sense of economic fragility, even if their finances were adequate or secure today. In a generational cascade, majorities said the prior generation had an easier time buying a home, starting a business or being a full-time parent rather than in the workforce, while majorities also said they lacked confidence that the next generation could buy a home or save adequately for retirement.
While Jeff Lindly, 61, said he believes the economy is improving slowly, his adult children’s experience in the housing market draws a contrast with his own. Lindly was able to earn enough to support his wife and family when his children were young. They bought a house and, later, built two more. Now, two of his three adult children live with him in Godley, Texas, one in a trailer on the property and one with her husband and child in the home.
“They can’t afford a house yet, even though they’re trying to save by living with us,” said Lindly, a real-estate appraiser who said that he expects housing affordability to improve with time and that he supports President Trump’s policies. His income recently has been about 40% of what is typical amid a slow housing market.
Bill Sanchez, 30, a criminal defense attorney who makes about $72,000 a year and is an Army veteran living in Stroudsburg, Pa., said the American dream isn’t as achievable now: “There’s limits to what hard work can actually bring people these days.”
Economists have puzzled for several years over a disconnect between the nation’s widespread, sour economic outlook and traditional measures that show the economy to be robust. That problem bedeviled former President Joe Biden and contributed to his party’s loss in the 2024 election.
Now Trump is contending with a similar disconnect after being powered into office by Americans who thought that his economic policies would improve their finances.
Trump has said “we have the hottest economy on Earth,” and inflation and unemployment aren’t high by historic standards. But only 17% in the survey said the U.S. economy stands above all others in the world. Nearly 40% said other nations have better economies—a 15-point rise from 2021. America, in some ways, has lost its sense of exceptionalism.
When Mahoney, the Stanford economist, and colleagues Ryan Cummings and Benjamin Harris looked at how economic metrics compared with economic sentiment, they found that the two moved largely in tandem from 2005 until the pandemic. Then, the two diverged, with sentiment turning more negative than predicted by traditional measures of the economy.
“The gap is staggering,” Mahoney said of the separation of sentiment from the solid economic metrics. One factor fueling the gap recently, he said, has been the stock market boom—“which has historically translated into stronger sentiment. But not on this occasion.”
Mahoney and a colleague conjectured that today’s disconnect has different causes than just a few years ago, when economic sentiment was weighed down by anger at inflation and high consumer prices. Today, they suggest, the low consumer sentiment reflects fears about the future.
A home out of reach
The Journal-NORC poll finds evidence for both: Americans remain concerned about prices and worried about the future.
It finds that concerns about inflation are sticky: The share saying rising prices were causing them major financial strains, at 28% of all respondents, was identical to a Journal-NORC poll in March 2023, when inflation was at 5%, higher than the 2.7% of today. The share saying inflation caused them minor strains, at 32%, was also unchanged.
Fewer than one-quarter of respondents said they were very confident they could buy a home if they wanted to. Some 56% said they had little or no confidence they could do so.
Christina Stephens, a 46-year-old Democratic tech worker in Kent, Wash., mentors early-career workers who seem defeated with high costs and a challenging job market. “Rents are sky-high; inflation is killing us,” she said. “A lot of kids are having to go back home. They don’t want to go back home.”
In her own life, Stephens has scrutinized streaming costs and tries to stay active on LinkedIn and keep her network warm in case she loses her job. “I don’t think anybody is safe in today’s climate,” she said.
Some who say they are financially comfortable nonetheless feel they can’t accomplish their goals. “We’re better off than 80-90% of Americans out there, but we’d like to have a bigger house. We’d like to be able to expand our family,” said Christopher Kishel, 40, who lives in Atlanta in a four-bedroom townhome with his wife and son, 2 years old.
He and his wife, who together make about $350,000 annually, looked for a bigger house for a few years to have more space for another child and dog. But they paused the search recently: Giving up their 2.5% interest rate would double their monthly housing spend.
“You can be comfortable but not where you want to be,” said Kishel, who voted Democratic in the last presidential election.
The economy’s ‘triple whammy’
Karlyn Bowman, senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said the sour public mood probably reflects that Americans have been buffeted by various economic forces for years, among them the financial crisis of 2008-09 and the Covid pandemic. Now they face inflation, labor-market concerns and tariffs—“a triple whammy,” she said.
Jerry Esch, 56, and his son-in-law Austin Odle, 35, are unemployed and job-searching together in northern Colorado. Their politics diverge: Esch supports many of the president’s policies and said he hoped the tariffs would ultimately bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. Odle is a Kamala Harris voter who is skeptical that Trump’s tariffs will do much beyond raising prices.
Esch, in Windsor, Colo., was laid off this summer after 20 years at Microsoft, where he made about $200,000 a year. He aims to apply to five jobs daily. He and his wife are still paying off their mortgage, and taxes and insurance costs have risen recently. Salaries, he added, haven’t risen in conjunction with “ridiculous” home prices: “How we address that is the biggest thing in fixing that American dream.”
Lately, he has had a new anxiety—artificial intelligence’s impact on the labor market. Companies must be careful, he said. “If you lay off too many people, who’s going to be your customers?”
Austin Odle at home in Severance, Colo.
Meanwhile, Odle and his wife have a 2-year-old daughter and another baby on the way. Despite earning an M.B.A., with many educational costs covered by the GI Bill, Odle said it would be hard to land a job that could get him the life that he wants. “It’s going to be what I need to do so my kids can eat,” he said.
Odle, in Severance, Colo., said he made about $120,000 a year in his last job, a leadership role for a friend’s cleaning business, several times as much money as he made in the Army. He still didn’t feel secure. He said he was close to paying off the roughly $70,000 of student loans, credit card debt and hospital debt that his family had accumulated but didn’t succeed before his layoff.
“I was doing everything, I thought, right, and still not feeling like I’m ahead,” he said.
The Wall Street Journal-NORC survey was conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago from July 10-23 and included 1,527 adults. Respondents completed the survey online, except for 42 interviewed by phone. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
Write to Lindsay Ellis at lindsay.ellis@wsj.com and Aaron Zitner at aaron.zitner@wsj.com
Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds