Personal and Public Power
State of Us: The gap between people and power is growing
Through Civic Pulse, we asked more than 46,000 Americans two simple questions:
How much impact do you think you can have on today’s biggest issues?
How effective do you think the government is at addressing them?
Then we looked across 10 core civic concerns: the economy and income, housing affordability, abortion and reproductive rights, healthcare, public K–12 education, climate change, immigration, gun rights and gun control, voting rights and election integrity, and worker rights and unions.
Together, these answers sketch out something more than numbers: a picture of where people believe in their own role in civic life and where that belief is breaking down.
A Snapshot of Personal Power
Across 10 of the defining issues of our time, only about 24% to 37% of Americans believe they can meaningfully move the needle.
But the story isn’t uniformly bleak. Beneath those low toplines, we uncovered patterns across age, partisanship, geography, and identity that shape how Americans perceive their own influence:
Youth believes. Across every issue, young people (18-29; echoing our prior Gen Z work) are consistently more likely to believe they can make a difference and that confidence drops steadily with age. This generational optimism is especially strong on workers’ rights and unions, housing affordability, and abortion / reproductive rights.
Partisan divides. Perceived personal impact splits sharply by political identity but in different directions depending on the topic:
On climate change, 38% of Democrats feel personal impact matters, compared to just 21% of Republicans.
On immigration, it’s the reverse: 30% of Republicans feel they can make a difference, versus 22% of Democrats.
On voting rights and election integrity, Democrats (38%) and Republicans (41%) are surprisingly aligned, while Independents trail behind at 29%.
And perhaps surprisingly, there is no meaningful partisan divide for education, healthcare, or housing affordability. Americans, regardless of political identity, feel similarly limited in their personal power for areas that likely feel close to home.
Parental optimism. Parents are more likely than non-parents to believe they can impact public K–12 education (37% vs. 23%).
Rural resignation. On workers’ rights and unions, belief in personal impact is stronger in urban areas (33%) than in rural communities (25%).
All of this data is a reminder that belief in personal agency is deeply shaped by context including who you are, where you live, and what issue is on the table. Even when overall faith is low, the fault lines tell us something powerful about where civic energy might still be found.
A Deeper Trust Problem
If Americans don’t feel empowered to make change themselves, do they at least trust the government to take care of it? The answer is, once again, a pretty resounding no.
In fact, across 9 out of the 10 core issues we asked about, faith in government is even lower than belief in personal impact. Just 17% to 34% of Americans think the government is effective or very effective at addressing these big challenges. The one exception? Immigration, where government efficacy leads belief in personal influence by about 10 percentage points (34% vs. 24% for personal impact; see above).
But here’s where it gets more interesting. We tested a wide range of demographics and none showed consistent shifts, except partisanship. When it comes to trust in government, political identity is doing all the heavy lifting.
Take immigration. Over the past six months, about 34% of Americans, on average, said the government was handling it effectively. But that average hides a sharp partisan spike. Since Trump’s re-election, Republican confidence in the government has surged, pulling the overall perception upward. As of May, the national rating stands at 41% not because belief is broadly shared, but because one party’s faith rebounded fast.
Or take voting rights and election integrity: Republicans’ confidence has increased while Democrats and Independents grew more skeptical, leaving the overall rating effectively unchanged at 33% in May. This marks a striking reversal from pre-2024 patterns when it was Republicans who most doubted election fairness following 2016 and 2020.
But this “halo effect” doesn’t stop at immigration or voting rights. In fact, it appears to extend across all 10 core issues, shaping partisan perceptions of government effectiveness more broadly. It’s a sign of how deeply political identity, media echo chambers, and cultural affiliation now anchor how people see, understand, and experience the world.
The Civic Rubik’s Cube
The data paints a clear picture: most Americans are living in a civic landscape where neither personal action nor institutional trust feels strong.
But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. If you zoom in, there are signs of where belief still lives.
First, take climate change: people are twice as likely to believe in their own personal impact as they are in the government’s ability to respond. That gap likely reflects decades of messaging connecting individual behavior—recycling, energy use, lifestyle—with environmental outcomes.
Second, the despondency around housing affordability is striking. It’s the only issue where more than two-thirds of Americans say they believe in neither their own power nor the government’s ability to address it. That kind of collective resignation points to just how deep and intractable the housing crisis feels, especially when both personal and institutional levers seem broken. But the issue isn’t just a lack of faith in government competence. It’s perhaps also indicative of a lack of faith in its responsiveness, its intentions, and its incentives.
Third, something interesting emerges around voting rights and election integrity. While still low, it stands out as the most malleable of the ten issues when you combine belief in personal and institutional impact. That movement, however slight, suggests elements of democracy may be more psychologically elastic than other policy areas. It’s a thin silver lining, but a meaningful one in a time when faith in the system feels so fragile.
Final Thoughts
While the overall picture may seem bleak, there’s a quiet kind of hope here, too: perceptions aren’t fixed. They move in response to consistent engagement, community relationships, long-term organizing, clear communication about impact, and also seemingly what we believe about who is in charge.
People still want to believe they matter. You can feel it in the way they talk about their communities, their concerns, and their hopes for change. But belief is fragile. Many are no longer sure the systems around them are listening, responsive to their needs, or even functioning.
This data doesn’t offer easy answers—but it does raise big questions:
What fills the gap when people stop believing in themselves and in public systems?
Can we protect youth optimism before it fades into resignation?
What does civic power look like when trust and action feel so far apart?
And how do we reintroduce the idea that participation is still worth it?
Our role, as civic participants, is to help reconnect the dots: between personal action, collective effort, and the institutions meant to respond to them. Because if people stop believing in all sides of that equation then democracy doesn’t just stall. It breaks.
Power’s out there. Most people just don’t feel plugged in.