A couple weeks ago we sifted through the emotional fog hanging over the country. Amid all the fatigue, frustration, and division, something unexpected keeps surfacing in Civic Pulse: hope.
We encourage you to visit https://research.murmuration.org/hope-2025 to access our data interactive that allows you to explore how Americans describe their hope for their future and how it shifts across age, race, gender, income, and political identity.
As you’ll see in the updated chart above, hope sits higher than every other emotional marker we track. Hope might be quiet but it’s also durable, and it keeps pointing us toward possibility.
Final Thoughts
Hope doesn’t come from nowhere. It grows out of relationships, trust, and the small acts that make life feel possible again. It’s both emotional and practical and a resource as vital to civic health as time, money, or infrastructure.
So, as we think about what it means to strengthen democracy, maybe we start with the emotional scaffolding that allows people to care in the first place.
A few questions linger for us:
What sustains your sense of hope, even when the future feels uncertain?
How do we make hope a shared practice rather than a private feeling?
What would it look like to design civic life not just around power, but around possibility?
And how can we make sure the people holding onto hope aren’t doing it alone?
Letting hope have the final word.
Murmuration is a non-profit that strengthens community-driven change at the local level. By equipping local organizations with powerful data, technology, and insights, Murmuration helps them amplify community voices, build collective power, and drive solutions that reflect the lived realities of the people they serve. murmuration.org