Voters in both parties increasingly see the American Dream being pushed out of reach and nearly half say that the country’s best days are behind us as views of Donald Trump’s second presidency continue to sour.
A Politico survey released on Sunday analyzed Americans’ views of the path the country is on and found that a greater share than ever before believe that the federal government and U.S. political system have become stubbornly ossified and require major shake-ups if the country’s future as a vibrant society and world-class economy are to continue.
The survey came on the heels of an ABC News poll released the same day that found a significant drop in the fears of many Americans about the country’s future in the wake of the 2024 election, suggesting a real rebuke of America’s aging political establishment is underway.
In the Politico poll, nearly 5 in 10 Americans say that the American Dream no longer exists — far more than say it does (26 percent). Overall, 49 percent of respondents said that America’s best days are behind it, while 41 percent said they were still to come. Just 10 percent of Americans said that the second Trump presidency represented America’s “best days”, including only 14 percent of self-identified Trump voters.
Meanwhile, the ABC News poll out Sunday shows that 67 percent of Americans still believe the country is on the wrong track, down from 75% in the leadup to the election in November of 2024.
The noticeable improvement comes after the defeat of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, who spent much of the year battling accusations that the president, Joe Biden, was mentally incapacitated and unable to fulfill his role at the top of his party’s ticket, forcing him to step down from his re-election bid late into the year.
The findings suggest that while a share of Americans saw the defeat of Biden and his allies in 2024 as a marked improvement in terms of setting the course for the country’s future, the vast majority of Americans still see more work to do. In the Politico poll, this view is supported by a greater-than-ever share of Americans who now believe that “radical” changes to America’s economy and government are required to avert disaster. This finding includes 46 percent of Trump voters and 58 percent of Harris voters.
Democrats in particular are panicked about the state of the country, with roughly half telling Politico that the U.S. was no longer a “functioning democracy” and a staggering 95% who told ABC News that the country was “pretty seriously off on the wrong track”. But Republicans are not wowed by Donald Trump’s second term either: 48 percent of all Americans say that the country has gotten weaker under his second term, according to ABC, while the share who say he has shown strength was only one in three.
Six in 10 voters overall told the ABC News pollsters that Trump’s management of inflation and tariffs were doing more harm than good to the American economy.
The share who said the economy is better under Trump is lower than both the share that thinks it got worse (52 percent) or has stayed roughly the same (27 percent). Even 20 percent of Republican respondents specifically laid the blame on Trump over Democrats like Joe Biden for the current rate of inflation, indicating that the president’s window for blaming his predecessor for the state of the economy has closed.
If Democratic leaders think those findings will translate cleanly into anti-Trump fervor with no blowback for them, think again: The share of voters who told ABC News that the Democratic Party was out of touch with average Americans was higher than the number who said the same about either Republicans or Donald Trump specifically. And on the issue of a generic midterm ballot, the Democrats held just a two percentage-point lead over Republicans in ABC’s polling.