Bipartisan concern about politics crosses age, gender, education lines, poll shows
The report, which surveyed residents across 140 countries in 2025, shows a steady climb in the share of Americans who view the political environment as a direct personal threat. The 10% figure represents an increase from 6% in both the 2021 and 2023 waves of the survey, which Gallup conducts in partnership with the Lloyd’s Register Foundation. As MSI previously reported, Americans report high anxiety about politics and economy, Gallup poll.
The United States effectively tied with Hungary for the highest share in the global ranking. Hungary recorded 9% in polling conducted months before its 2026 national election. Serbia, Latvia, and Lithuania followed at 6%, and Slovakia, Russia, Myanmar, Spain, and Israel each recorded 5%. The global average across all countries was 1%. The United States was the only country where more people named politics than their own health conditions as the leading risk to their personal safety.
“No other country ranked higher. It’s 10 times the global average,” Benedict Vigers, a senior global news writer at Gallup, said of the U.S. result. “It speaks to how charged the political environment is and has been for many years in the United States that people are now saying that the political situation is not just an issue nationally but is a seeable daily risk to their safety as they go about their normal lives.”
The survey’s authors placed the findings in the context of a decade of intensifying political violence in the U.S., including three assassination attempts against Donald Trump, the 2025 fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and a surge in threats against election administrators and local officials. Vigers said that almost all respondents who named politics as their top risk referenced polarization, either by blaming the opposing party or by citing a “heightened sense of polarisation.”
“I would have to say the state of polarisation of the American people,” a 54-year-old Republican man told the survey. A 42-year-old independent male respondent said he saw the biggest risk in “people that are fanatical about their position and that they could be violent.” A 69-year-old Democratic woman said the political situation “has a lot to do with the fact whether if I am safe or not. I am concerned where we’re going or might go.”
The World Risk Poll results align with a broader pattern of disaffection captured in other Gallup surveys. In 2025, a third of U.S. adults named politics and government as the country’s most important problem. Fifty-eight percent said the government “does not care about them at all,” an 11-percentage-point jump from 2021 that placed the U.S. among the most alienated populations in the OECD. In 2024, 5% of Americans named the United States itself as its own greatest enemy, the highest proportion on record for that question.