In 1964, 77% of Americans said they trusted their federal government to do what’s right most of the time. Today, that number is 17%. That collapse didn’t happen overnight, and the reasons behind it cut far deeper than any single election, scandal, or president.
The American democracy crisis playing out right now isn’t just a political crisis. It’s a crisis of belief – in institutions, in elections, in the basic idea that the system works for regular people. And the data from every credible tracking body says the same thing: something structural has gone wrong, and most Americans already know it.
Seventy percent of Americans agree that politicians do not care about people like them, according to a 2025 survey from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. That isn’t the view of a fringe. It’s a majority, and it spans party lines.
The Numbers Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
A national survey of 4,500 Americans by the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and Public Agenda found that Americans are deeply concerned about the state of U.S. democracy, with divisions extending to views of presidential power, constitutional limits, elections, and trust in government. Among their findings: 84% of survey participants say democracy is in crisis or facing serious challenges, a number that crosses party lines.
Since 2007, the share of Americans who say they trust the government always or most of the time has never exceeded 30%. The post-9/11 surge to 54% in October 2001 is now a historical curiosity. Over the past seven decades, trust in the federal government has dropped from postwar highs to historic lows. In 1964, 77% said they trusted Washington to do what is right most of the time. As of September 2025, that figure stands at just 17%, according to Pew Research Center.
Dissatisfaction with democracy itself has followed a similar trajectory. Most Americans say democracy in the United States used to be a good example for other countries to follow but has not been in recent years, and roughly seven in ten Americans are dissatisfied with the way their democracy is working, according to a 2026 Pew Research Center analysis. That same analysis found the U.S. consistently received a Freedom House score of 90 or higher through 2015, but fell below that level in 2016 and has not recovered since. In 2025, the U.S. received a score of 81, down 3 points from 2024.
Of the 88 countries rated Free by Freedom House, the United States experienced the sharpest decline in 2025, with a drop of 3 points to a score of 81 on the report’s 100-point scale. To put that in context: since 2005, the United States has dropped 12 points. In comparison, the average dip for a European Union country is just four points.
How the World Now Ranks American Democracy
The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index – which scores countries from 0 to 10 – tells a similarly grim story. The U.S. is categorized as a “flawed democracy” in 2025, with a score of 7.65, its lowest since the EIU began the index in 2006. It dipped below the threshold for a “full democracy,” defined as a score of 8 or higher, back in 2016. The U.S. fell six spots in the global ranking to 34th, slipping further into the “flawed democracy” category, with several actions and policies of the Trump administration cited for challenging democratic norms and decreasing civil liberties scores.
The V-Dem Institute’s assessment is starker still. While democracy is declining in many parts of the world, the U.S. has experienced a more significant fall than other high-income democracies, according to the 2026 V-Dem report. Prior to 2017, V-Dem rated the U.S. as more democratic than most of its peer countries in the Group of Seven. In the organization’s latest analysis, the U.S. democracy score is below that of all other G7 nations.
In the V-Dem Institute’s democracy report published in 2026, the U.S. was classified as an “electoral democracy” for the first time in over 50 years, losing its status as a liberal democracy. That’s a formal category change, not a rhetorical flourish. By V-Dem’s formal scores, the U.S. declined from 0.75 under Biden to 0.57 under Trump, a 24% decline.
Freedom House’s 2026 Freedom in the World report noted specifically that media freedom, personal expression, and due process registered the most severe deterioration over the last two decades. Global freedom declined for the 20th consecutive year in 2025. More than 50 countries saw political rights and civil liberties deteriorate, including the United States.
The Election Trust Problem
Institutional distrust doesn’t stay abstract for long. It eventually lands on elections – and that’s where some of the most unsettling numbers live heading into the 2026 midterms.
60% of respondents said they are confident votes will be counted accurately nationwide in 2026, down from 77% just after the 2024 election, according to a UC San Diego survey. That’s a 17-point swing in confidence in a single electoral cycle. One-third of Americans say federal elections are not free and fair, the Johns Hopkins study found.
Young Americans are especially skeptical. According to the Spring 2026 Harvard Youth Poll, only 33% of Americans ages 18 to 29 believe that the 2026 midterm elections for Congress will be conducted fairly and accurately. The data across parties is strikingly similar, indicating that the lack of electoral trust among many young Americans is bipartisan.
Distrust of elections compounds with distrust of government more broadly. Trust in the federal government among young Americans ages 18-29 has fallen to just 15%, according to the Spring 2026 Harvard Youth Poll. And only 13% of young Americans say the country is headed in the right direction, according to the Harvard Institute of Politics.
In 2024, only 42% of 18-to-29-year-olds cast a ballot in the general election, down from 48% in 2020, according to research from the Kettering Foundation. That same research found a sharp generational divide in democratic faith: 80% of respondents 65 and older agreed that democracy is the best form of government, but only 53% of 18-to-29-year-olds did the same.
Barack Obama’s warning about what democracy cannot survive has drawn renewed attention from political observers who see it as among the most direct assessments he’s offered since leaving office.
Structural Rot, Not Just Political Mood
81% of the nation’s 435 House seats will be safe for Republicans or Democrats in 2026, leaving just 8% as true toss-up races, according to a FairVote analysis. That means most members of Congress face no real competitive pressure in a general election. Their incentive is to win a primary, which rewards ideological extremity, not governance.
Trust has become a partisan jersey rather than a civic baseline. Wide gaps in government trust among partisans help explain the long-term declines in overall public trust. Supporters of the incumbent president’s party continue to express high levels of trust in the government. Among those opposed to the president’s party, trust has collapsed in recent decades, stacking on top of a steady decline among independents, according to Gallup.
Even compared to other nations experiencing their own crises of democratic confidence, the U.S. stands out. In a spring 2023 survey of 24 countries, more than 80% of Americans said elected officials do not care what people like them think, making the U.S. one of only a handful of countries where that sentiment exceeded 80% of the population, according to Pew Research Center.
87% of Americans believe the U.S. is in a full-blown cost-of-living crisis, with almost eight in ten saying everything became more expensive in 2025, according to a 2026 survey by Current. 52% of Americans struggle to pay bills such as rent on time each month, and 50% struggle to afford groceries. When daily survival feels precarious, democratic participation can feel like a luxury.
Among adults ages 18-29, nearly half (49%) delayed or skipped medical care in the past year due to finances, the Century Foundation found in 2026. That’s the generation simultaneously being asked to carry democracy forward while trusting it the least.
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What Good People Can Actually Do
Only about one in four Americans (24%) believe democracy is performing well, while a majority – 51% – say it is performing poorly, according to the Kettering Foundation and Gallup’s 2025 Democracy for All Project. The survey drew from over 20,000 adults and is the most extensive annual study of its kind. Among those who want significant political change in their country, a 2025 Pew analysis of 25 countries found that Americans are not confident the system can change – placing the U.S. among nations where desire for reform and pessimism about its prospects run in parallel.
V-Dem data offers a counterweight to fatalism: in 70% of cases where a country was trending toward autocracy, that process was ultimately reversed. The common factors in democratic recovery tend to involve courts checking executive overreach, civil society mobilizing ordinary people, and competitive elections that give voters a meaningful choice. Courts have been performing some of that checking function throughout 2025 and into 2026. Civic organizing has intensified across the country in response to the pace of institutional change.
Where This Goes Next
Two-thirds of Americans still say democracy is the best form of government, even as 51% say it isn’t working. That gap, between belief in the idea and confidence in the system, is where democratic renewal either starts or stalls. The 2026 midterms are one of the most direct electoral tests in recent memory of whether Americans want to change course.
Gen Z is the least likely generation to endorse democracy as the best form of government, with only 54% agreeing, compared to 78% of Baby Boomers, according to the Kettering-Gallup research. If that skepticism deepens into disengagement, the downstream effects on voter turnout and civic pressure will compound existing structural problems. If it converts into action, it becomes the most significant political variable of the decade.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.
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