The American Dream’s Not Dead. So Why are Republicans Acting Like It Is?

The GOP abandons the ideal of opportunity at its own peril.

Courtesy Nathan Dumlao/Unsplash.

Americans’ belief in the American dream—that in the United States, those who work hard will succeed—is at a record low. In a recent poll conducted jointly by the Wall Street Journal and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 69 percent of respondents said that the idea doesn’t hold true anymore or never did. According to Axios, that’s the highest percentage of pessimists in almost 15 years of surveys on the subject, up roughly 3 percent from 2024.

Has, then, the American dream—what historian James Truslow Adams called the country’s “only unique contribution to the civilization of the world”—run its course in American politics? I don’t believe so. And politicians on both sides of the aisles—especially Republicans—would do well to recognize that.

Last year, Gallup partnered with the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream to conduct a study of how Americans experience the American dream. The results of the survey, with a nationally representative sample of over 6,700 U.S. adults, showed that most Americans agreed that the American dream was alive and well. But how they defined the idea was predictive of how hopeful they were in eventually achieving it.

Gallup asked respondents whether they believed the American dream was more about stability—“being able to support your family with a job and safe place to live”—or opportunity—“being able to improve the quality of life for you and your family through education, better job opportunities, and other resources.”

Overall, Americans were split almost evenly on the meaning of the idea. A slight majority (51 percent) of U.S. adults said the American dream had to do with improving quality of life through opportunity. 49 percent said it had to do with finding a job and a safe place to live. Those who said the dream was about opportunity were more likely than those who said it was about stability to believe the concept was still relevant and achievable for both them and future generations.

These results, however, varied significantly based on respondents’ socioeconomic status, level of educational attainment, race, and whether they were foreign-born, among other factors. As always, the devil is in the cross-tabs.

For example, a majority (55 percent) of Americans who reported their annual household incomes to be less than $50,000 said the dream was about stability. The same was true of those who reported between $50,000 and $100,000 (51 percent). Upper-income adults, by contrast, defined it by opportunity (75 percent of those making over $250,000 per year).

Similarly, those with lower levels of education were less likely to see the idea as being about opportunity than those with more schooling. This held true even after accounting for respondents’ income, with 59 percent of college graduates choosing opportunity over stability when defining the American dream.

It’s unsurprising that high-income earners and college graduates see the American dream as being about upward mobility through education and opportunity. Far more significant—and electorally consequential—is Gallup’s finding that, even today, most racial minorities and immigrants do, too.

Source: Gallup.

Indeed, majorities of Asian, black, and Hispanic Americans told the pollster that for them, the idea had more to do with opportunity than with stability. This was true at all income levels. By contrast, white Americans associated the American dream with opportunity only if they made more than $100,000 per year; for low-income whites, it was overwhelmingly about stability.

Whether respondents were immigrants or the children of immigrants also determined how they viewed the American dream. More than two-thirds (69 percent) of U.S. adults born abroad, as well as 59 percent of U.S. adults with at least one parent born abroad, associated the idea with opportunity. Meanwhile, native-born Americans were split almost evenly on the issue (51 percent for stability versus 49 percent for opportunity).

As was the case with Asian, black, and Hispanic Americans, these gaps persisted irrespective of immigrants’ annual household income. Majorities of both upper- and lower-income first- and second-generation immigrants defined the American dream as about opportunity, not stability. Native-born Americans, on the other hand, were divided. Those who made less than $100,000 per year leaned more toward stability, while those who made more than that leaned toward opportunity.

Why does this all matter electorally? In recent months, Republicans seem to have concluded that the American dream is more about stability than opportunity. The clearest example of this is the Party’s newfound hostility toward high-skilled immigration, especially the H-1B visa program and its participants.

Consider how, in September, the Trump administration introduced a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visa applications, ostensibly to be taken on by employers. Just this week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt, and Congressman Byron Donalds (who is looking to replace DeSantis next year) called for the program to be terminated, claiming that it “steals” jobs away from native-born workers. And on Sunday, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote that “mass migration is theft of the American dream” on the social media platform X.

Unlike some of his Republican peers, the Vice President has equated the American dream with stability for quite some time. In a 2021 speech, for instance, he shared the following:

I worry a little bit that when people hear the phrase “the American dream,” their eyes sort of glaze over. Because the way it’s been taught to by [sic] so many establishment Republican politicians is that the American dream is the dream of Mitt Romney. It’s private jets. It’s fancy businesses. It’s a lot of money. But that’s not the American dream that most Americans actually occupy. They just want to live a good life in their own country.

Of course, it is possible for Americans, whether they were born here or abroad, to desire safety and security for themselves and their families while also aspiring for more. Mitt Romney is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but he’s also been married for 56 years and has 25 grandchildren. Opportunity and stability don’t have to be mutually exclusive. In America, after one can come the other.

Vance’s own life story, along with that of his wife—the daughter of two Indian Hindu immigrants—is a testament to this. As Gallup’s poll suggests, an American dream rooted in both opportunity and stability will appeal to large swaths of the electorate. One that eschews the quintessentially American concept of upward mobility, while villainizing immigrants and racial minorities in the process, will likely have the opposite effect.

Republicans’ electoral success rests on a multiethnic coalition that, according to Gallup, deeply values the American dream as an ideal of opportunity. In fact, many of these voters admire President Donald Trump precisely because his life embodies success, excitement, and glamour. For Republicans to become the “stability party,” then, is to risk a fundamental contradiction and potentially alienate all aspiration-minded voters.

Plus, America already has one political party that prioritizes stability over opportunity, including a new standard-bearer in the form of a 34-year-old socialist. We don’t need another party to do the same thing.