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.