Americans more fearful heading into the New Year than last year: poll

Omicron blizzards, runaway wild fires, mandates, supply-chain snarls, inflation, culture wars, midterm elections.

What could go wrong in 2022?

A lot, Americans say, according to a poll published by Axios out Friday which shows we're more apprehensive about going into 2022 than we were about kicking-off 2021.

The meme '2020 too' made the rounds on social media on New Year's Eve, showing the hesitation over things to come, and fears it would be a repeat of the year that COVID first turned life upside down for billions around the globe.

More than half of those surveyed -- 54 percent -- are more fearful going into 2022 than they were last year.

'As we look to the new year, COVID pandemic running rampant. Infection rates are at an all time high. I'm pretty sure next year isn't 2022; it's 2020 too,' tweeted Daylight Savings Justice Warrior.

'The end of last year was a particularly hopeful time,' Laura Wronski, a data scientist at Momentive, which conducted the poll, told the news site.

The online poll surveyed 2,602 adults, and the margin of error is plus or minus two percent.

'I think after this year we realized it's not going to magically get better, that we're going to have to live with COVID for a while.'

But personally, most -- 68 percent -- in the survey said that their future looked brighter.

Surprisingly, the pandemic is not the thing most American worry about, 61 percent said that they were more hopeful than fearful about beating back the coronavirus in 2022.

But they said they were also tired of COVID-19. The issues that they said they'd like to hear less about were the pandemic and former President Donald Trump, though President Biden ranked high among Republicans.

Democracy was the thing that those polled found most worrisome, 17 percent said they feared what would happen over the next year.

Republicans have a grimmer outlook than Democrats.

The survey found that 66 percent of the GOP were pessimistic about what would befall he country in the next 12 months, 41 percent of Dems were similarly fearful.

But more Democrats surveyed -- 24 percent -- said that the health of our government was a top issue than Republicans, 15 percent of which thought it was the priority. Only 7 percent of independent voters thought it was an issue.

After the Great Resignation of 2021 in which millions of people were laid off or quit, jobs and the economy ranked second, with 13 percent fearful over those issues in 2022.

Words that American said best described the year were 'exhausting' (43 percent), 'worrisome' (43 percent) and 'chaotic' (31 percent), similar to words that people used to describe 2017 and 2018.

'All of these factors are just multiplying right now, and it's hard to know what a normal year is because we haven't had that in a long time,' Wronski told Axios.