(Illustration by Maria Carluccio)
Many Americans struggle to have hope in these times of crisis. Since COVID-19’s onset six years ago, we’ve lived through mass death, economic whiplash, accelerating climate disasters, an attack on the US Capitol, book bans and curriculum censorship, rollbacks of reproductive rights, mass deportations, defunding of cultural institutions, killings of American citizens by armed federal guards, and the steady normalization of white nationalist rhetoric, amplified by media feeds that turn these crises into endless engagement loops.
To be sure, people and organizations still formulate, and advocate for, bold solutions to address our most pressing problems. But no matter how effective these solutions would be if implemented, we find that people doubt that any of these solutions will plausibly happen, which in turn undermines them before they are even tried. At BLIS Collective, a solidarity and action hub that leverages narrative and storytelling to advance transformative social policy, we call this measurable distance between support for a cause and belief in its feasibility the Hope Gap.
Support is easily quantifiable, is comparable over time, and often predicts voting behavior. But support alone doesn’t give us a complete picture of how people feel about an issue, emotionally and psychologically. Hope, the belief that change is possible, must be part of how we understand support. Large shares of the population may endorse a policy or goal, but if people don’t believe that it is achievable, they are far less likely to commit their time or resources.
In this prolonged era of political exhaustion and apathy, identifying and quantifying hopefulness can be a powerful tool for addressing hopelessness. In the face of overlapping crises, we must bring a critical lens to what breaks down and, more important, what builds hope, because it is essential for collective action.
Quantifying the Hope Gap
Take, for example, the climate crisis: 83 percent of Americans say that the United States should participate in global efforts to combat climate change. Yet, only 38 percent feel optimistic that the United States can actually address climate change. That pessimism undermines the supermajority support for action that could, if energized, ensure that action gets taken.
Guaranteed income and universal health care suffer from their own stark Hope Gaps. Preliminary evidence from a nationally representative survey conducted by BLIS and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation shows that while 35.1 percent and 52.9 percent of Americans support guaranteed income and universal health care, respectively, only 9 percent and 10.5 percent of these supporters believe the policies can ever pass nationwide.
Next, consider reparations for Black Americans: financial and nonfinancial measures meant to acknowledge and provide material and symbolic redress for the causes and consequences of slavery and racial terror in the United States. Research conducted by partner Liberation Ventures in 2021 found that 37 percent of Americans support a comprehensive reparations policy, an increase of 10 percent from 2019 and 23 percent from 2002 in national polls. Despite this marked increase in national support over the last two decades, only 11 percent of Americans believe reparations will ever be implemented, according to a 2024 poll by Liberation Ventures.
Our own research this year has found that there is a sizable Hope Gap for reparative policies among Black and Indigenous communities, who have long been denied justice. While 76 percent of Black people surveyed expressed support for reparations, only 21.5 percent believed they were achievable.
For Indigenous communities, we found that 80 percent support Land Back—an Indigenous-led grassroots movement aimed at reclaiming sovereignty and stewardship of ancestral lands, practices, and lifeways stolen through colonization—but only 19 percent believe Land Bank is possible. Taken together, these data indicate that evaluating movement support alone may vastly underestimate the proportion of people who believe that the movement can succeed, and therefore the share of people who are motivated to take action.
Crucially, the Hope Gap is not simply a matter of apathy. For historically marginalized groups, it reflects a rational response to their lived experience. Movement leaders have been assassinated, movement work has been surveilled, and policies have been dismantled soon after they’ve been won. In such an environment, it is both strategic and wise to maintain a degree of cynicism and caution.
Yet if we mire ourselves in cynicism without cultivating forms of grounded, constructive, and radical hope, we sap the energy from the very movements that can make bold change happen. The Hope Gap is therefore also an important framework for organizations to strategize around in their research and advocacy efforts. To confront skepticism, organizers must understand what underlies a lack of hope in their communities and design communications that speak to those realities to address their local Hope Gaps.
The Hope Gap is not only an important metric but also an important indicator of direct action. Based on our data, being “hopeful” about a movement predicts someone’s likelihood to donate, volunteer, or take concrete action in support of the issue.
Specifically, among Black respondents, those who were “hopeful” that reparations could happen were 11 percentage points more likely to take action in support of reparations than those who were “doubtful.” Among Indigenous supporters, those who were “hopeful” were 9 percentage points more likely to state that they would take action in support of Land Back than those who were “doubtful.”
Filling the Hope Gap
Closing the chasm between support and hope requires a deeper understanding of why the Hope Gap exists, how it has been shaped across different groups, and how we can persuade people to believe that our solutions are possible, so that they participate in getting them passed.
The hope we measure and cultivate must acknowledge the challenges so many people are facing and still insist on the possibilities of our movements. As Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire argued, hope is an “ontological need”—part of what makes us human. “We need critical hope the way a fish needs unpolluted water,” he wrote in Pedagogy of Hope. But only when hope is “anchored in practice,” according to Freire, does it start to shift laws, institutions, and daily life. In other words, hope without praxis drifts into wishful thinking, while praxis without hope lumbers in cynical, uninspired advocacy.
Studying what can close the Hope Gap will help us build more effective movements and sharpen our framing, messaging, and storytelling to convert public support into conviction and action. Specifically, we offer three recommendations for movement organizers, researchers, and funders:
1. Conduct Pulse Checks | Before you start collecting data on public support for an issue, check with critical constituencies about how plausible they find the solution or policy. Investigate what obstacles people feel stand in the way of solving the issue and whether those obstacles feel intractable.
2. Quantify the Hope Gap | Analyze the share of supporters who doubt its feasibility. By adding a single question to your survey (e.g., “How likely do you think it is that X will be passed?” or “Do you believe X will ever happen?”), you’ll surface this overlooked segment that doesn’t need to be convinced of the solution, but that we must inspire to believe in its possibility.
3. Test What Closes the Hope Gap and Target Your Messaging | Once you’ve measured the Hope Gap, test what closes it, then target your interventions. Start with hypothesis-driven experiments (A/B testing) that vary frames, messengers, content styles, and proof points. Look for which frames are more likely to increase feasibility beliefs, thereby shrinking the Hope Gap.
Through this research, you can also get a better understanding of the “doubtful.” For example, younger Black people (18-36) in our data were more hopeful about reparations than older Black people, while hope about Land Back is concentrated among older Indigenous people (26-45 years old). This kind of demographic information can and should be paired with targeted focus groups and interviews to surface specific roadblocks for those who harbor doubts. Together, this research can inform strategic communications through canvassing, email, social media, and storytelling. Test and scale what works, retire what doesn’t.
We know from prior research, particularly in climate politics, that people lose hope partly because they don’t hear enough about the wins and positive momentum from social-change work. Media and social media often emphasize crises and failures, which can create a distorted sense of actual progress. Climate communication experts note that sharing stories of solutions and wins can instill hope by showing that action is underway. Accordingly, other movements need to test what kinds of stories and expressions of wins might chip away at the Hope Gap.
To be clear, closing the Hope Gap does not mean that we need to deny the reasons people feel despair. On the contrary, naming the grief of the pandemic, the fear of climate collapse, and the exhaustion that people are feeling due to the backlash of racial-justice progress helps build credibility.
This honesty must be paired with a compelling vision of what we are fighting for, not only what we are fighting against. Hope is contagious when it becomes tangible, so we must design to make progress visible and celebrate incremental wins as stepping-stones, not footnotes in our journey.
Read more stories by Camilla Griffiths, Trevor Smith, Christina Pao & Justin Morgan.