Americans in 1998 tried to predict 2025. Here’s what they got right
Discarded telephones litter an office desk in February 1996
(CNN) — In the year 1998, Bill Clinton was facing impeachment proceedings, “Titanic” was cleaning up at the Oscars and most households still had landline phones. Gallup and USA Today called up 1,055 Americans on those landlines and asked them for their best predictions about a year in the distant future: 2025.
Those predictions are now memorialized via polling archives maintained by the Roper Center at Cornell University. So, with the final days of 2025 now slipping into the past, here’s a look back at how some of them held up.
Some were surprisingly prescient. Most Americans predicted that, over the next 27 years, the country would have elected a Black president, gay marriages would be legal and commonplace and a “deadly new disease” would have emerged.
Most people in 1998 correctly doubted that space travel would be common for ordinary Americans or that alien life forms would have made contact.
Other predictions didn’t hold up as well. About two-thirds of Americans thought the country would have elected a female president by now. More than half expected a cure for cancer and 61% expected that “people will routinely live to be 100 years old.” (The world is not quite there yet.)
The poll also asked some less quantifiable questions about the direction the country was taking. It revealed plenty of pessimism.
While 70% thought quality of life would improve for the rich, respondents were about split on whether things would improve or worsen for the middle class, and most expected life to get worse for the poor. Nearly 8 in 10 expected Americans in the future to have less personal privacy, and 57% thought that they’d experience less personal freedom. Most also expected higher crime rates, poorer environmental quality and lower moral values. A 71% majority said it would be harder to raise children to be good people.
There were a few bright spots in Americans’ outlook: Most believed race relations would improve and that medical care would be more available, if less affordable.
Gallup is still polling, of course, albeit with less of an emphasis on landlines. So we can get a sense of how Americans’ overall outlook on the country has changed over the past 27 years. In fall 1998, about 60% of Americans said they were satisfied with the way things were going in the US.
Today, that number stands at 24%.
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