Since 2001, Gallup has asked US voters whether they think their financial situation is getting better, staying the same, or getting worse. This year, a record number of Americans answered, “getting worse.”

The knock-on surveys about economic anxiety is that respondents’ answers are often shaped at least partly by their degree of optimism or pessimism about the future, and those sentiments are strongly influenced by partisanship. Members of one political party generally feel better about things when their party is in charge, and vice versa. For example, 25% of Republican voters in 2024 said their financial situation was getting better, but in 2025, 61% did (+36). At the same time, the share of Democratic voters feeling good about their financial prospects fell from 66% before Donald Trump was elected to 16% after (-50).

Out of politeness, let’s describe this partisan-obedient behavior as interesting, even though many of us actually think it’s moronic. So why take the data seriously at all? Because despite people’s interesting behavior, the data somehow still ends up making sense; as a whole, the anxiety is justified. The percentage of Americans who said their finances were getting worse shot up in 2008 (as it should, considering the financial crisis) and in 2020 (as it should, given the pandemic). The percentage falls when it’s supposed to, too: in 2021, the share reporting deteriorating financial conditions dropped by 20 percentage points. That happened because the United States stumbled into building an almost European-level welfare state through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act or CARES Act (March 2020), Consolidated Appropriations Act (December 2020), and American Rescue Plan (March 2021). The result was a disjointed but formidable array of social programs overlapping in 2021, which led to a sharp decline in economic insecurity.