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.
Most people in 1998 correctly doubted that space travel would be common for ordinary Americans or that alien life forms would have made contact.
Other predictions didn’t hold up as well. About two-thirds of Americans thought the country would have elected a female president by now. More than half expected a cure for cancer and 61% expected that “people will routinely live to be 100 years old.” (The world is not quite there yet.)
Continue reading the complete article on the original source
