The Ipsos Vibe Check: Here's how Americans feel about the government this week

With everything going on in the U.S. these days, and COVID-early-days levels of uncertainty, we started a new module in the Ipsos Consumer Tracker. It asks a two-part question: How uncertain are you feeling about the impacts of the actions of the government and how satisfied do you feel? 

Explore our interactive chart to see how it's changed from week to week, and scroll further to read an in-depth analysis of each wave!

Week of June 3, 2025: We drifted a bit more uncertain this wave 

Most groups drifted toward greater uncertainty this wave. The "big, beautiful bill"passed the House, bringing with it sweeping cuts to the size of government and tax cuts. But the Congressional Budget Office points to a multi-trillion-dollar hit to the deficit, and many of the government services being cut are rather popular. Some, notably Elon Musk, don’t think the cuts go far enough. What will make it through the Senate? It’s unclear. 

Also unclear is the state of tariffs, but the market has stopped whipsawing based on the tariff news, at least. All of which leaves consumers and business leaders alike still feeling this lingering unease in may ways. But in other ways, we’re still spending (see below). By other ways, I mean good ways and not so good ways. Stay tuned for some new numbers on Buy Now Pay Later in an upcoming Ipsos Data Drop!

Previously on the Ipsos Vibe Check:

Week of May 19, 2025: Uncertainty is leveling off for now 

At the time we fielded, tariff news had seemed to chill out a bit. Most of the tariffs seemed reduced (though still there, and not small in the case of China, just not as large originally promised) or postponed. 

But after we came out of field, the House passed the budget bill and President Trump threatened new tariffs on the European Union and smartphones. So of course, we’ll keep an eye on things. The only groups that became more uncertain were younger Americans and, interestingly Republicans. Pretty much everyone’s satisfaction ticked down, but all within the margins. 

But perhaps things are leveling off because fewer people think prices are rising, as we saw in another question this wave.

Week of May 5, 2025: Uncertainty persists

So here’s the thing with the Vibe Check, in what is now its third month: This is data that really shouldn’t move too much. It’s a pretty simple set of questions. And yet… here we are, bouncy bouncy bouncy. For the most part, the demographic splits are moving together. Look at the data by income, age, gender, or most other splits and everyone is kinda clustered there in the middle, drifting to more uncertain and less satisfied. The Republicans and Democrats are where you would expect them, though also sliding a little to the lower left.

The independents, however, are just wild. In the first four waves, your swing voters, those not tethered to an ideology, rotated counter-clockwise through all four quadrants. They’re basically the only ones to ever enter the lower right. This wave, they’re starting to pull away from the pack and look more like the Democrats.

When we started this in February, if we looked at the satisfaction question and we saw a lot of ratios of 2:1 or 3:1, in terms of people rating their satisfaction with the government a 1 (very unsatisfied) vs. 5 (very satisfied). Now those have gotten even farther apart. The ones outnumber the fives 5:1, 6:1, and even higher. Young adults 18-34 are deeply, deeply unsatisfied, as are suburban residents. There’s a lot going on here, and it’s starting to seep over into other data, now too. There’s an item in the Care-o-Meter that will likely start moving these dots even more in coming weeks and months.

Week of April 21, 2025: Consumers are freaking out a little less

In some ways the bounciness of the Vibe Check is telling: We’re uncertain about how uncertain we are. Which is kind of fascinating when you look at it that way. It’s not hard to imagine why we’re feeling this way. At one point on CNN.com this week the lead story was “We’re suddenly talking about the Great Depression when discussing Trump’s stock market.” But the bullet point below was “Dow surges 1,000 points.”

The Dow has dropped 1,000 points 19 times in its history. Three of those days occurred in April. So, too, did two of the 13 gains of 1,000 points.

Independent voters have been interesting to watch amid all these changes. In the first four waves of the Vibe Check, they moved into each of the four quadrants of the chart. They moved again this wave. Overall, every group had trended decidedly more uncertain before this wave. Now we’re easing off that a little, almost to back where we started in February. Which, in itself, was right around the middle of the chart for most groups, evenly split about how freaked out they were. 

Week of April 7, 2025: Consumers are freaking out about the government

Something is going on with consumers, and they seem to be freaking out. In a chart we’re now calling the Ipsos Vibe Check, we’re measuring uncertainty and satisfaction. We’ve done this now over the last eight weeks and it’s one of those things that shouldn’t really move too far too fast. And yet, there’s a definite shift toward more uncertainty and less satisfaction with the goings on in the government. Now 46% say they have “a lot” of uncertainty (+10pp from February) and an additional 33% have some uncertainty.

If you couple this with the MetLife & U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index where inflation concerns are at a record level (58%) as are revenue concerns – 35% now cite revenue as a challenge, up 10 points from last quarter – you see a picture of small business owners stressed about both supply and demand. And this was fielded before Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs were announced (and then partially paused).

In the Ipsos Vibe Check, independent voters have been especially bouncy. This wave saw their uncertainty drop back down to the levels we saw originally (after a 23-point spike) but their satisfaction has fallen more than any group. That’s left them into a quadrant all to their own. But perhaps the real story is Republicans, who have seen 13 points of movement toward more uncertainty in just eight weeks. Though interestingly their mean satisfaction has ticked up a bit (to 3.4) and remains almost a full point higher than any other group or the average (2.5).

Meanwhile, checking back in on our threat index question, twice as many Republicans (20%) now say the political climate is a high threat than they did just two months ago when we started tracking this. Other groups are mostly flat at 30% feeling a high threat. Add in almost four in ten who feel at least moderately threatened and that’s… not great. Only 25% say they feel a low or very low threat.

Week of March 25, 2025: Uncertainty grows across America

The new Ipsos Vibe Check shows that uncertainty continues to grow across every demographic, with the biggest shifts among women and the affluent. Oh, and a huge shift (23 points!) among independents. The independents have now fully broken from the pack and are looking a lot more like Democrats in many ways. Things are generally starting to striate a little bit. Also, a majority of every demographic split is now either stuck or has a lot of uncertainty. If you add in the “some uncertainty” it’s close to 90% for everyone except Republicans, and even they show 70% having at least some uncertainty. Satisfaction also fell among most demographics, with again the strongest shift in independents but also the affluent. Now a lot of demographics are under 2.5 on a 5-point scale.

Week of Feb. 24, 2025: Republicans and independents are feeling more threatened

As the Trump administration enacts their agenda at breakneck speed, a lot is changing politically and geopolitically. To some, it feels like five years ago with a high level of uncertainty – maybe even more so. For the first years of the pandemic, Ipsos ran a segmentation called the IPAC. It asked a battery of questions to gauge how America was feeling in the moment. In the last wave, we piloted a modified version about our political climate. We ask three questions. One is about the level of personal threat people feel about the political climate. Then we asked a two-part question, again adapted from the IPAC, looking at how uncertain people feel because of the polices of the federal government, and how satisfied with the federal government.

In the last wave we saw “bad-days-of-COVID”-levels of threat felt by the Democrats. This wave, that has increased overall by 6 points. Now one in three Americans feel a high or very high level of threat. We’re now in even thirds between high threat/moderate threat/low threat. That increase was partly driven by a 5 point increase in the Republican threat level, which is still small (15%), but that’s up 50%. More striking is the jump among independents, who saw their threat level double to 30%. Half of Democrats fall into the high threat group.

On the certainty vs. satisfaction scale, something interesting is going on. Since our last wave just two weeks ago, certainty and uncertainty have flipped. Last wave it was 45% uncertain, now it’s 54% uncertain. Like the threat level, this jump is driven by Republicans and independents. But nearly every demographic split posted some increase in the level of uncertainty.

What’s interesting is that, at the same time, nearly every demographic also posted either flat or somewhat higher levels of satisfaction. Overall, the cluster moved up and to the left from last wave. It will be interesting to watch this over time.

Week of Feb. 11, 2025: The only ID that matters is Party ID

As the Trump administration enacts their agenda at break-neck speed, a lot is changing politically and geo-politically. To some, it feels like five years ago with a high level of uncertainty – maybe even more so. For the first years of the pandemic, Ipsos ran a segmentation called the IPAC. It asked a battery of questions to gauge how America was feeling in the moment. 

So, we thought we’d pilot a modified version about our political climate.

One of the IPAC questions was about how much of a personal threat COVID posed. In the height of the pre-vaccine pandemic (July 2020) 28% of Republicans and 41% of Democrats said it posed a high threat. Now, even more Democrats (49%) say the political climate poses a high threat (just 10% of Republicans agree) than thought COVID was a high threat. That’s about where the Democrats were in November 2020, as the Delta variant was spiking to 800,000 cases a day! 

We then asked a two-part question, again adapted from the IPAC, looking at how uncertain people feel because of the polices of the federal government, and how satisfied with the federal government.

Today, 12% feel stuck about what to do next. One in three have a lot of uncertainty and another 37% have some uncertainty. Only 15% say they have no uncertainty. If we bucket those into the high (stuck/a lot of uncertainty) and low (some uncertainty/no uncertainty) we are evenly split between those two.

In terms of satisfaction with the government, only 10% say they are very satisfied and about three in 10 say they are very unsatisfied. On this five-point scale, the mean is a 2.6, so just over the halfway point. That’s due to a third of people giving the government a three out of five. “Unsatisfied” outnumbers “Satisfied” by a two-to-one margin (45% to 22%).

That’s all at the surface. But dig in and you see… that basically every demographic split is the same. There’s little to no variation in our uncertainty (evenly split) or our satisfaction (we’re much more dissatisfied than satisfied) across gender, age, race, income, urban/rural, education, employment, marital status, whether we’re working remotely, whether religion is important us, or if we’re hopeful for the future. That’s a ton of really consistent crosstabs.

Then you look at party ID. Hey, look at that.

Democrats are five times as likely to feel stuck (19% to 4%) and three times as likely (56% to 19%) to have a lot of uncertainty. Republicans, not surprisingly, have the highest mean level of satisfaction (3.2) and Democrats have the lowest (1.9). But it’s worth noting that so far, even Republicans are only 41% satisfied, which is four times higher than the Democrats who are 74% DISsatisfied to Republicans’ 21%.

So on the surface, we’re pretty evenly divided, just as we saw in the polls. Beneath the surface we are, too. But when it comes to our party identification, we are moving farther and farther away from each other.

Keep an eye on this, and consider political party identification in all of your research. Party splits crop up in places you might not expect them. They don’t necessarily correlate to any other split. And anything that could potentially become political, quite likely will. See the introductions to What the Future Transportation or Food for some examples.