‘Deadly New Disease’: 1998 Poll of Americans’ Predictions for Future Were ‘Surprisingly Prescient’
A 1998 poll by Gallup and USA Today surveyed Americans for their predictions about the year we’re about to finish, and several of their guesses for what 2025 would bring were “surprisingly prescient,” reported CNN’s Ariel Edwards-Levy.
In 1998, wrote Edwards-Levy, “Bill Clinton was facing impeachment proceedings, ‘Titanic’ was cleaning up at the Oscars and most households still had landline phones.” (Two out of three of those can be seen in the photo above.)
The pollsters called 1,055 Americans and asked them to predict if certain events would or would not have happened by the year 2025.
“Some were surprisingly prescient,” wrote Edwards-Levy, with people correctly guessing that we would have elected a Black president, gay marriage would be “legal and commonplace” — plus the emergence of a “deadly new disease.”
Americans were correctly skeptical that space travel would be common for ordinary people (still pretty much limited to billionaires and pop stars) or that aliens would make contact (as far as your friendly neighborhood Mediaite contributing editor is aware, not yet, but there’s a soundtrack ready for if/when it happens).
Americans circa 1998 did get some things wrong, expecting a cure for cancer, a female president to be elected, and people to “routinely live to be 100 years old).
“The world is not quite there yet,” wrote Edwards-Levy.
Screenshot via CNN.
Gallup still regularly polls Americans about a variety of topics, noted Edwards-Levy, including our opinion of the country — and we’ve gotten a lot more pessimistic over time:
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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