Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics.
Have we entered a new age of American malaise?
New data from Gallup finds that just over 18% of American adults have or are being treated for depression, meaning that an estimated 48 million adults are depressed. Not only does that mark the third year in a row with a share around 18%, but also all three of those years are starkly higher than the average of 12.8% who reported being depressed between 2015 and 2020.
While those date ranges largely sort into pre- and post-pandemic timeframes, the potential causes are a lot messier the more you dig into the data.
The biggest increases in rates of depression were among adults ages 18 to 29 and adults whose household income was less than $24,000 a year. Each saw around a 13-percentage-point increase in depression since 2017. As Gallup notes, younger and lower-income Americans’ financial struggles no doubt contribute to their higher depression rates After all, the pandemic rattled the job and housing markets, which haven't stabilized since then.
The trouble is, the Trump administration is trying its hardest to make these problems worse.
In July, President Donald Trump signed his tax legislation, which primarily transfers wealth from the poorest Americans to the richest. It does this by gutting Medicaid and federal food assistance, costing the poorest Americans roughly $1,200 every year, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Meanwhile, the richest Americans will see their incomes increase by nearly $14,000 a year.
Although the Trump administration may soon declare a national housing emergency—and it is an emergency—it surely won't use this proclamation to build more affordable housing or increase population density. After all, it’s hard to think of things that the right hates more than cities and public housing.
“In fact, Trump’s non-housing policies will discourage home construction,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote on his Substack in early September. “Nothing says ‘make housing cheaper’ like imposing a 35% tariff on imports of Canadian lumber and deporting many of the immigrant workers crucial to the U.S. construction industry.”
But it's not just housing and employment sectors that feel hopeless. The last time a majority of registered voters thought the economy was getting better was in February 2018. Sixty-four percent of Americans see racism against Black people as widespread in the country, and that number has been increasing since at least 2009. For the past four years, around 40% of American parents fear for their children's safety at school—the highest rates since the years immediately following the Columbine High School massacre, in 1999. High-profile acts of political violence appear to be on the rise, like Wednesday’s assassination of bigoted right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Things aren’t looking great.
In fact, earlier this year, Gallup found that Americans are less satisfied with 26 of 28 national issues than they were in 2017, at the start of Trump's first term. Their falling satisfaction spans issues from the size and influence of major corporations (down 14 points from 2017) to the national quality of public education (down 13 points). But the issue with the largest drop in satisfaction since 2017? “The overall quality of life,” which plummeted 18 points.
In its writeup of the depression-focused survey, Gallup notes that the share of Americans who report feeling lonely (21%) is the highest it has been since March 2021, while the COVID-19 pandemic still raged. And conservatism's goals have long been for people to not see themselves as part of a large collective.
“There's no such thing as society,” said conservative icon Margaret Thatcher, who was then the prime minister of the United Kingdom, in 1987. “There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbors.”
But Trump and the modern right seek to stratify society even more, to pit neighbor against neighbor, to eliminate the collective. Look at the response to COVID-19 alone: Conservatives went frothy at the mouth over the idea of getting vaccinated to help, if not themselves, then their immunocompromised neighbors. Or look at climate change, and how the conservative movement is repulsed by the prospect of people banding together to fight an existential threat. After all, this is the crowd that greets anyone even slightly to their left with "Fuck your feelings.”
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, perhaps the most important question facing America is: How do you have a functioning society when so many neighbors hate each other, when so few are satisfied with the quality of life, and the government seems unable or unwilling to fix things?
Yeah, that is pretty depressing.
Any updates?
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Trump wants more war, or at least things to be named "war," because the word “war” is cool and manly, or something. But his move to rebrand the Department of Defense as "the Department of War” faces a chilly public reception, to say the least. Just 21% of Americans support the rebrand, while 59% oppose it, according to a new survey from YouGov.
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Late last month, Trump tried to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, a move she is disputing and suing over, as he seeks to put the national banking system under his control and further hobble the American economy. Unsurprisingly, Americans widely oppose Trump's actions, with 70% saying he should not be able to can members of the Federal Reserve Board if they don't share his opinions, per a new YouGov poll for CBS News. What's more, 68% of Americans want the Federal Reserve to act independently from Trump, thereby revealing that his authoritarian project lacks a public mandate.
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Amid Trump and the right’s assault on the nation’s schools, especially its universities, Americans’ perception of the importance of higher education is at a new low. Gallup finds that just 35% of Americans think that going to college is “very important.” Forty percent say college is “fairly important,” while 24% say college is “not too important.”
Vibe check
On Wednesday, shortly after Kirk’s murder, YouGov asked Americans whether violence could ever be justified to reach political goals. Eleven percent of Americans say it can be, and that includes 14% of Democrats, 13% of independents, and 6% of Republicans. But these responses are no doubt tempered by the assassination of a right-wing figure, changing how acceptable partisans say violence is or isn’t.
After all, polling not conducted immediately following an assassination has found Republicans more supportive than Democrats of political violence. For instance, a poll fielded last June by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 27% of Republicans agreed that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country”—while only 8% of Democrats did.
However, it’s very likely these polls overstate Americans’ appetite for violence.
A 2022 study published in the esteemed scientific journal PNAS finds that past research tended to vastly overrepresent the public’s support for political violence. This was primarily due to “random responding by disengaged respondents” and “a reliance on hypothetical questions about violence in general instead of questions on specific acts of political violence,” according to the study’s authors.
The study controlled for respondents’ engagement and asked them more specific questions—and support for political violence was far, far smaller. When asked whether a politically motivated shooter should be charged with a crime—notice the specificity there—96% or more of engaged respondents said “yes,” regardless of the party affiliations of the shooter and the victim.
“A small share of Americans support political violence, but most of this support comes from a troubling segment of the public who support violence in general. Even among this group, support is further contingent on the severity of the violent act and is generally limited to relatively minor crimes,” the study’s authors wrote. “Mainstream Americans of both parties have little appetite for violence—political or not.”
Andrew Mangan September 15, 2025 at 12:00AM From Daily Kos
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