One in 10 Americans Now Say Politics Is the Biggest Threat to Their Personal Safety, World Risk Poll Finds

Americans are more worried about politics as a personal safety threat than anyone else in the world, according to the 2026 Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll, conducted by Gallup across 140 countries.

Ten percent of U.S. adults named politics as the single greatest risk to their daily safety when asked an open-ended question, according to Gallup News. That's up from 6% in both 2021 and 2023, and it's 10 times the global average of 1%.

The U.S. is statistically tied with Hungary, at 9%, for the top spot worldwide, Gallup reported. Hungary's number was measured months before its recent election. Serbia, Latvia and Lithuania followed at 6%, with Slovakia, Russia, Myanmar, Spain and Israel at 5% each.

Americans still say road accidents and crime are the biggest overall dangers they face, not politics. But the U.S. is the only country in the survey where more people named politics as a bigger threat than their own health conditions, according to both Gallup and The Guardian.

This isn't a new trend, it's an acceleration of one. Gallup notes the U.S. has ranked among the countries most likely to cite politics as a personal safety risk in all three waves of the World Risk Poll. 2025 is simply the first time it topped the list outright.

Nobody agrees on why, but everybody agrees it's bad

There are no statistically significant differences in who's naming politics as their top safety concern. Not by age, gender, education, or party registration. Republicans, Democrats and independents are all similarly likely to say it, according to Gallup's own data.

What differs is who they blame. Gallup and The Daily Beast both report that many Democrats point to the Trump administration, while many Republicans point to the Democratic Party. That's polarization functioning exactly as designed, each side certain the danger comes from the other team.

Some respondents skipped the finger-pointing and named the dysfunction itself. A 54-year-old Republican man told pollsters: "I would have to say the state of polarization of the American people." A 42-year-old independent man cited "political extremism," adding that fanatics "could be violent." A 69-year-old Democratic woman said she's "concerned where we're going or might go."

The Daily Beast's headline frames this as Americans topping a "grim global ranking under Trump," which is one legitimate way to read the timing since the current spike coincides with his second term. But the underlying Gallup data doesn't support pinning this on one administration or one party. The number climbed from 6% to 10% across years spanning different presidents, and Gallup is explicit that Republicans and Democrats cite the risk at similar rates, just aiming their blame in opposite directions. The Daily Beast does capture the blame-both-ways nuance further down in its piece, so the framing is more about the headline than the reporting itself.

The backdrop: a country that thinks government doesn't care

This fear doesn't exist in a vacuum. Gallup's broader polling found that in 2025, 33% of Americans named politics and government as the country's most important problem, far above the global median of 8%, and behind only the Philippines (51%) and Taiwan (50%).

In 2024, 5% of Americans named the U.S. itself as its own greatest enemy, the highest figure Gallup has on record. And in 2025, 58% of Americans said the government doesn't care about them at all, a record high, up 11 points from 2021. Just 4% feel cared about "a lot."

The Guardian's reporting adds important real-world context for why this number might be rising: three assassination attempts against Donald Trump, the 2025 killing of Charlie Kirk, the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, and a documented rise in doxing, swatting and death threats against election officials. Those are concrete, sourced events, not vague vibes. Whether respondents were thinking of specific incidents like these or simply the general atmosphere of hostility isn't something the poll itself can separate out.

What the poll can't tell us is whether this represents genuine, calculated risk assessment or a media-and-social-media-amplified sense of threat. If a third of the country thinks government itself is the biggest problem, and one in 10 thinks politics is a literal safety hazard, that's either a sign of a genuinely more dangerous political climate, or a sign that Americans have been conditioned to see enemies where none exist, or, most likely, some mix of both. Gallup's next wave of polling will show whether the number keeps climbing or whether 2025 was the peak.