I find the shift in black and Hispanic responses interesting as well. They were higher than white people before and now lower.

Even the 50+'ers are out here at 53%.

yeah i feel like the 1960s were the last time that people could actually be born and expect a lifetime of good employment options. for everyone after that, we're either getting the scraps, there's a declining labor market, we get to do the jobs today that didn't get done in the decades earlier, because nobody bothered to do them before, because they're less rewarding, anyways there's a ~~stagnating~~ declining labor market because there's just not so many more things to do. if you're born in 1800, people are spreading all over america, there's lots of stuff to do. if you're born in 1900, the electrical power grid just got invented, now there's time to build an industry. but now? (most of) all the technology is invented/developed. my honest prediction is that spaceflight is gonna be the last option to grow the economy, because space is (in principle) infinite, if we dare to use it. but apart from that, i don't think that people will have actual jobs (that are actually meaningful, no bullshit jobs, that pay actual wages, that actually improve society by a significant bit).

on the other side, it might be the start of a good time for all the people who don't actually want to work, because that's becoming a possibility, if we can push through the tax reforms to actually give wealth to the people, all of them.

Even republican respondants going down is surprising

The three major groups of minorities are the emancipated black children of slavery, immigrants, and various natives.

For black people, even if equality hasn't been achieved, there was a rather large increase in quality of life for the overall community, even if it wasn't a uniform increase.

For immigrants, a lot of immigrants were able to improve their quality of life both within their generation and beyond to their next generation.

For various native groups, they are a rounding error compared to the first two groups.

Hunger, suffering, death, etc

many words today are used in a way that they can be interpreted in many ways, sothat each chooses the interpretation they like the most

some interpret:

• "getting ahead" = getting head. getting sexual experiences because times are good, people are enjoying things
• "getting ahead" = winning some race against somebody else. competitive people, competitive mindset. somebody else has to lose sothat you can win
• others just don't think about it and just take it as a "okay everything is good" thing.

Things have definitely still gotten harder. Your framing isn't great because it implies things were just as hard a decade ago, which many factors point that isnt the case. I'm not saying it was easy then or the 67% were right, but things have gotten worse.