Americans in 1998 tried to predict 2025. Here’s what they got right

Americans in 1998 tried to predict 2025. Here’s what they got right

• Americans in 1998 predicted a Black president and legal gay marriage by 2025
• Many expect less privacy, more inequality, and tougher times for the middle class.
• US satisfaction dropped from 60% in 1998 to 24% in 2025.

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In 1998, when Bill Clinton was headed into impeachment, Titanic was winning Oscars, and landlines still ruled, Gallup and USA Today asked 1,055 Americans to make predictions about the world of 2025. The results are preserved in the Roper Center’s polling archives at Cornell, which is why they still read like a message in a bottle as 2025 closes.

What they nailed, surprisingly

A chunk of the public turned out to be more forward-looking than we sometimes give it credit for. Many expected the United States to elect a Black president. Many also predicted gay marriages would be legal and common. And the idea that a “deadly new disease” could emerge did not sound far-fetched to respondents, long before COVID-19 put that fear into lived experience.

They were also realistic about what would not become normal. Space travel, they largely guessed, would not be something ordinary Americans do routinely. And they did not expect alien contact to arrive with fireworks and a press conference.

Where the optimism overshot reality

Two expectations, in particular, show how hope can look like inevitability when you are peering into the future. Roughly two-thirds thought the country would have elected a female president by now. It still hasn’t happened. On health and longevity, many imagined breakthroughs arriving faster than they have: a cure for cancer, and a world where living to 100 is routine. Medical advances have been real, but not in the sweeping, universal way people imagined.

The pessimism was the point

The more revealing part of the poll was not the tech-and-science guessing game. It was the mood. Respondents were already bracing for a country where the rich do better, the poor do worse, and the middle class is uncertain. They expected less privacy and less personal freedom. They expected higher crime, lower moral values, worse environmental quality, and a harder job raising children “to be good people.”

In other words, even in the late 1990s boom years, a lot of Americans were not picturing a future that felt calmer, fairer, or easier. They were picturing pressure.

A few rays of light, even then

Not everything was bleak. Many believed race relations would improve. They also thought medical care would be more available, even if it became less affordable. That combination is striking, because it suggests people could already see the outline of modern American life: more access in theory, more friction in practice.

The number that really lands in 2025

CNN’s kicker is the simplest comparison. In fall 1998, about 60 percent of Americans said they were satisfied with the way things were going in the US. Today, that figure is 24 percent. Whatever you think about the reasons, the direction is unmistakable. The most accurate “prediction” from 1998 might be the one they did not make explicitly: that confidence in the national trajectory would erode.