Whoever made the poll asked the right questions.
That last one is a trick question. Depends on how you define “war”. By some accounts we never stopped being in a state of war somewhere since well before 1998. But if you ask congress, last time was WWII.
It’s not a trick question. It’s obviously referring to a war on the scale of WW2. A total war that requires major government intervention in the economy and everyday life. That’s why it says “full scale war,” not merely “war.” The last full-scale war we had was WW2.
Then there was the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, etc.
Remain in a constant state of some sort of war, and you can rationalize militarizing all your multi-redundant law enforcement agencies over every square inch of the map.
Well accroding to Congress the second World War also ended with the defeat of the Viet Cong
1998 feels like a completely different world. I’m watching through 3rd Rock from the Sun, watched S03E21 which aired in April of 1998. In the episode Dr Albright, a college professor, hires Sally, one of the main characters who is an alien posing as a human, as her research assistant. In the episode Albright hands Sally a handwritten speech and tasks her to fact check the speech by visiting the library. 📚 Can’t imagine a situation like that occurring today.
I love 3rd rock from the sun
Oh snap, are you at the episode with Randy yet? (Season 3, episode 27) It ends in a cliffhanger to end off Season 3,
Spoiler
wherein Harry gets kidnapped to be put in a carnival.
You’ll notice, in the start of Season 4, that Randy never returns. This is because Randy was played by Phil Hartman, who died only 8 days after the last episode of Season 3 aired on TV.
When I first watched the series, I was a kid and didn’t know why his character was abandoned. Learning about it later, and knowing what a key figure he had in animation (voicing characters on The Simpsons, and being the person that Futurama’s Zapp Brannigan was designed to be played by), watching that arc felt very different.
RIP Phil, you’re still missed.
Nothing about socialized healthcare. Pathetic.
Insurance was better (at least where I was) and overall prices for many things was not as awful. It’s not to say there weren’t problems, there were and they got roasted in various comedy skits and such, but it was less awful for many. There also probably wasn’t as much knowledge of other systems in a lot of the population yet. I don’t recall knowing how any other country did it then.
Nothing about Palestine either. Obviously this means something.
That’s because everyone knew it wouldn’t happen.
Will America have socialized medicine by 2050? Upvote for yes downvote for no.
Even in 1998 they knew a black president was more likely than a woman making it into the office…
Well, they were right, the people definitely elected one.
Well. Half black anyway.
…
Person: My great-grandfather was Korean.
The Asian Council: spends two minutes deliberatingPerson: I’m 1/8th black.
The Black Council: instantly You’re black.College Humor had it right. (Catbox alt)
Is that Rose from Star Wars?
Ya know, my first thought was “I see the resemblance but I don’t think they’re the same person.” And then I checked Wikipedia and there she is! Television, 2014, CollegeHumor, ‘Full Asian.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Marie_Tran
“illicit drug use such as marijuanja and cocaine”
Yeah just throw those two together into the same question! That makes sense!
Yeah, the zeitgeist of 1998 was… different. D.A.R.E. really did a number on folks.
It’s still wild seeing billboards for weed, even though there’s people still in jail for selling it. :/
Selling it? How is that wild?
Back as late as ‘15, cannabis was illegal in large portions of the US, if not all of it. People, predominantly Black people, would be given heavy multi-decade sentences for distribution of illegal drugs. Since then, cannabis has become legalized in certain states, and yet those people are not free.
When the weed shop looks like an Apple Store, but the people previously vending weed are in prison still, that’s a problem.
Also many cannabis capitalists are…the cops and judges who recently put black homegrowers behind bars.
Federal vs state? Really shit that our country has like 85% non-violent prisoners, almost all are drug users.
Because billboards are giant adverts offering to sell it
Yes, but selling drugs is not cool, even when there are legal institutions that are allowed to do it. You can also get amphetamines and opioids as real medication.
So long as it’s being used in a responsible fashion and not being given to minors: why do you give even a single fuck?
Once again, I’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.
is it being used in a responsible fashion?
i dont live in a country where weed is legal, but i can say that others like nicotine and alcohol are definitely not used responsibly
Some people are, some people aren’t. The important thing is that it’s none of your business.
For your information, I’d like to mention that I actually joined the war on drugs. On the side of drugs of course
Hell yeah. A fellow vet.
selling drugs is not cool
I’m gonna need a source for that /s
Get rid of the /s. All the bud tenders at my dispensary are deffo cool.
I’m on your side, personally. It’s not always possible for a person to be fully informed of the effects of habit-forming drugs before taking them. Society should do something to protect the population, even if it in to prevent self-harm.
So you’re logically consistent, and in favor of banning the most dangerous drug - alcohol. Right?
Honestly, kinda. Alcohol kills too many people, both self-harm and other people when operating vehicles.
Did you read the full sentence?
Like white folk weren’t on coke since forever
In 1988 the public perception was that they were equally bad. There were people who tried to claim that marijuana was harmless, but they were “crazy pothead druggies”.
The line my shitty parents would always give was “all the people we know who do a lot of marijuana are burn outs and don’t go anywhere in life” to which my internal mental response has evolved into “CORRECTION all the people you know who are stupid enough to let your judgemental-ass know they smoke marijuana you mean”.
Some of my parents best friends regularly smoked marijuana when I was growing up and neither me nor my parents knew because those adults knew how childlike and intellectually unserious my parents’ judgements were around drug use.
Loitering, littering, and mass murder will be on the rise.
The use of stimulants was more accepted back then, with ephedrine routinely sold as a diet aid. I wouldn’t be surprised that people judged cocaine less harsh because of that.
Also a lot of people used cocaine.
Yeah but even if things were like that this question is still like asking “Do you participate in recreational activities such as snuggling up with a blanket and reading or bungee jumping?”.
The two drugs just don’t have much to do with each other, they are done in completely different social environments with totally different intentions.
I mean I am sure most people who do cocaine also are willing to smoke weed but that is more of a “why not?” thing than there being any logical connection at all between the two drugs (if you are willing to break societal norms and do coke, you are also probably willing to break societal norms less and do marijuana).
They don’t have much to do with each other, but it is more the public perception of the risk of both drugs.
Use*
I mean I throw them together in the same bowl
Around here we call that “Putting sugar on your Weedies.”
Hurts to see being able to work from home. We’re starting compulsory RTO starting next week.
We’ve had the ability to work from home since the 90s. It took a pandemic to make it acceptable. Now it’s rubber banding back.
There were probably more questions on that Gallup poll that had below 50%. Curious to see what those were.
The actual poll is here, but it’s locked behind membership; I can’t find any additional downloads. https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/study/31088367
The original article that the graphics came from is here, though: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/29/politics/americans-predictions-1998-2025
I never would have expected in 1998 just how many of these would come to pass, how close we are on AIDs and Cancer, and that we still would not have elected a woman president
I mean, the issue with the female president thing is that people keep pushing too hard for it. At this point we’ve had multiple female vice presidential candidates, multiple female presidential candidates, and a female vice president. The Dems had a big influx of female congresspeople in the last few years, and some of the most prominant GOP voices are women. While there are still non-negligible barriers to women assuming leadership roles, there are certainly fewer than there used to be, and there is no obvious reason why a woman couldnt be president. Which is essentially what a reasonable person would want - a woman should be president because there are no female specific barriers for entering the role, and then via a normal statistical distribution, eventually one will be elected.
The problem is that the two female presidential candidates we’ve had have been bad candidates. They were establishment politicians running in an anti-establishment climate, where the Democratic party was hoping that the identity politics of running a female candidate would outweigh the unpopularity of the candidates themselves. And then when they inevitably lose, their boosters cry misogyny rather than recognizing that they simply ran a bad candidate.
We can contrast the Harris and Clinton campaigns with the Obama campaign. Obama had a popular (if fluffy) message and was a legitimately charismatic and appealing candidate from outside the party establishment. His campaign was “Hope and Change”, not “Look, he’s black! Everyone vote for him or you’re racist!” But the overemphasis on Clinton and Harris’ sex was actively off-putting to voters. Everyone can implicitly tell if you are get votes from identity politics, and they don’t like it.
And then when they inevitably lose, their boosters cry misogyny rather than recognizing that they simply ran a bad candidate.
That the thing - those two aren’t mutually exclusive. Harris’s platform was flimsy and constructed out of bullshit. But if she instead had been a white male, it’s very possible trump would have lost. His platform was ALSO flimsy and constructed out of shit.
One day we may very well achieve actual equality. But today, a woman of mixed ethnicity has more barriers to overcome than a loud rich old white man.
I don’t think so, I believe Biden is the real reason Harris lost. She had too much ground to make up for Biden’s stubbornness to realize he was a weak candidate. Trump’s entire strategy was based on how weak Biden was and the party turning against him in the 11th hour only reinforced Trump’s claims. Kamala was doomed from the start, I believe she could have won if she had taken the lead from the start of the race. She wouldn’t have been my first or even my second but I still think she could have won if Trump didn’t have a head start and Dems taking so long to pull their heads out of their asses.
if she instead had been a white male
I feel like the most obvious counterfactual here would be if Biden had kept his faculties and run for a second term - an establishment politician running for business as usual. And I don’t think he would have won. His presidency had left people disillusioned with him and seeking something new, and more of the same - regardless of the wrapper - was going to lose. Not to say that a woman of color doesn’t face more barriers than a white man - but I don’t think those barriers were the determining factor in Harris’ loss.
I can’t understand how anyone can look at Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney and musing about how great Dick Cheney is and think that campaign would have worked for anyone. Add in the fact that trump (though lying) discussed affordability and Harris was all “we’ll get you generational wealth too, somehow!” like that fucking meant anything and that she backed off of the actual popular positions she held historically such as m4a and it completely mystifies me that anyone can seriously look at her campaign and say that being a woman is anywhere near the top of the list of reasons voters were not motivated to vote for her.
I wouldn’t say people are pushing too hard for it, or that people are saying look she’s a women vote for her or you’re sexist. At least, I don’t think that was really the pitch before the election. ‘Its her turn’ was a blunder but at least the pitch I got from the campaign was largely 'Do you want Trump answering the warroom in the middle of the night or seasoned diplomat Hillary’ with a side of ‘Obama’s recovery was great, just look at the stocks’. I do agree about the two primary winners we have had though, they were not it. To avoid repeating myself too much here since I went into it in another comment, I think Hillary’s outsized party influence also fucked us by not giving us as full a complement of primary challengers as we should have had, and odds are one or more of them would be a woman who doesn’t have to dig herself out of decades of Washington insider dislike
Edit: typos and styling
Not having a woman president, I blame the wife of the man that Trump blew.
Yeah, she really did blow it. It felt like her entry into the race convinced women I would have much preferred as candidates not to enter. A lot of people don’t share my feelings about Warren in the 2020 election (mostly that her alleged betrayal is overblown, and that I thought she was the best fit as a compromise candidate between progressives and centrists), but she didn’t enter in 2016 and neither did several other high profile women, I think probably because of behind the scenes pressure from Clinton’s people in the DNC. Hell even Kamala Harris should have been in the primary in 2016. I don’t like or think either her or Warren are good people to be clear, but they’re each better than Trump or Hillary and maybe if Kamala had actually run in the 2016 primary she wouldn’t have been so bad at it by the time she was up in 2024.
Hillary’s power in the party and intimidating name recognition robbed us of a term’s worth of qualified candidates, many of them women, who didn’t want to publically go against her.
how close we are on AIDs
I mean, technically we DO have cure right now for HIV. Only 7 (maybe 8) people have had it though because the cure is worse than the disease. These folks only got the cure because they were trying to cure something worse and curing their HIV infection was just a bonus.
Yeah, that’s what I mean. AIDs felt insurmountable as a disease when I was younger. You mean its an illness that just fucks up your immune system so bad almost everything can kill you?, but these days we have PREP and drugs that can push you into Untransmissable territory, which is a stunning achievement. It went from ‘I don’t know if there will ever be an answer’ to ‘the answer feels like it’s just around the corner’ in 27 years
In the years before PREP and just had the triple cocktail, I had a friend that worked in operating rooms doing liver transplants. She talked about the damage Hepatitis does to a liver (and how we simply have no way to live without a healthy liver besides transplant). She told me she’d much rather have HIV than Hepatitis.
And to your point, now we’re even have PREP. So something that was seen as a growing pandemic level death sentence is now a manageable and affordable routine. This is the wonderful power of modern medicine.
I mean, they could’ve been more incorrect.
My response exactly
Cancer will be cured
This one sticks out to me because the question is too vague. If it said, “All forms of cancer will be cured,” which is logically equivalent to the one given, then the only answer for anybody who knew anything about the subject is “no.”
So, it seems that either people misunderstood the question, or don’t know enough about cancer to realize that it’s really a collection of terrible diseases that, at our current level of understanding, seem to need different treatments.
Some people might have been thinking of a magic cure-all, others of a variety of improved treatments. There were many people alive in 1998 that had been cured of cancer already.
Until I went into the cancer treatment industry, I mostly thought cancer was just a single process with a single cause (except for maybe leukemia but I also don’t know that I knew that was a cancer in 1998) that just happened to different parts of the body.
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I wish I had 1998’s optimism.
The emergence of a deadly new disease
Wishy-washy question. New diseases emerge all the time, and what do you mean by “deadly”? Almost all diseases can be deadly some of the time, almost none of them are always deadly. We’ve had several “new” diseases that are deadly often enough to be worrying, but no wide spread new ones that are as deadly as rabies. Also, what does it mean for a disease to be “new”? Because of a lack of sexual procreation, and therefore lateral gene transfer, neither viruses nor bacteria are species-forming. Every new individual ever is a new diverging point for a line of successors, and that line will never, can never merge back with the rest of the population. The point at which a strain has mutated enough to be called a new disease is basically a matter of opinion.
Gay marriages will be commonplace
Again, wishy-washy question. What is commonplace? I don’t know a lot of people who would still object to gay people’s right to marry, but I personally don’t know a single married gay couple. Is it commonplace? I can’t tell.
Country will have elected a black president
Clear yes. A big part of the country had a very dangerous and still going meltdown over it, but still, the answer is a clear yes.
Country will have elected a woman president
Clear no, if by a small margin on two occasions.
Illicit drug use, such as marijuana and cocaine, will be commonplace
Again with the “commonplace”. It’s hard to define. I’m going by “illicit drugs” meaning drugs that were illegal on a federal level in 1998 (not that this will make that much difference). By my gut feeling, I would say this was already “commonplace” in the eighties and nineties. Though it does seem to have increased since then.
AIDS will be cured
There have been a small number of cases where it actually worked, but to my knowledge nothing universally applicable. AIDS treatments, however, have become so good that the disease is no longer seen as a major problem of our times.
Cancer will be cured
That was always a non-starter, and even people in 1998 should have known that. Cancer is not one disease, at best you can cure a small specific subset of cancers.
Most stores will be replaced by shopping on the Internet
Brick and mortar stores have become fewer, but it’s hard to tell how much of that was Internet shopping and how much was market consolidation into powerful big-box stores.
Most people will do their jobs from home.
We didn’t even come close to “most” during Covid. Most jobs just cannot be done from home.
United States will be involved in a full scale war
What’s “full scale”? There were certainly a few that were “full-scale” for the other side. Shit, there only just was one shortly before this poll was conducted…
There have been a small number of cases where it actually worked, but to my knowledge nothing universally applicable. AIDS treatments, however, have become so good that the disease is no longer seen as a major problem of our times.
We have a type of stem cell treatment used in extreme blood cancer situations that had cured a number of people of AIDS. To my understanding, it should work for most patients, but it’s a risky and extreme enough procedure that it’s not worthwhile compared to the standard treatment regimen. But if you also get leukemia, the treatment might cure both diseases.
Cancer is not one disease, at best you can cure a small specific subset of cancers.
With one given treatment, maybe. As far as I’m aware, there aren’t any cancers that are in principle untreatable, though a handful are very difficult to cure people from. We have a wide variety of treatments for a wide variety of cancers, some of which are now really close to 100%.
Actually, didn’t Hillary get more votes than Trump?
Some cancers have been cured
Gay marriage is still effectively illegal in many areas and the push for completely illegal is constant
“Most jobs” could be done remotely depending on how you’d see most. Almost all office jobs can be done remotely. If you’re in front of a computer all day, you are likely able to do it remotely. You do not have to physically be in an office. If I had to guess, they asked a bunch of office workers as they had more time to actually go through questions like this
I contend that the US has not stopped being at war since at least Regan or Bush sr. See: Afghanistan starting with the support of the mujahideen
A lot of these came true. Like the drug thing.
