One thing President-elect Trump has benefited from again and again is low expectations. People didn’t think he could win the nomination. People didn’t think he could win the election. And with each unexpected success, a larger number of people are willing to give him a chance.
But now expectations are very high — among consumers, as high as they’ve been since well before the financial crisis.
Consumer confidence jumped more than forecast this month as Americans expressed the sunniest picture of their financial situation in 11 years, extending a boost following Donald Trump’s election victory… The current conditions index, which measures Americans’ perceptions of their personal finances, increased by 4.8 points to 112.1, the highest since 2005.
A record share of respondents “spontaneously mentioned” the positive impact from new policies, according to the survey, with more people expecting the economy and job market to strengthen in the coming year.
There’s a problem with high expectations: you need to meet them, or else you’re underperforming. That’s the big lesson of President Obama’s first term, and probably of his entire presidency.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that Trump and/or Paul Ryan have some practical solutions to the slow economic growth of the Obama era. (If they don’t, then it’s a moot point.) Democrats still have the votes in the Senate to stop much of what the Republicans might want to do.
You can blame the total implosion of the Democratic Party under Obama on other factors, like Obamacare and their attempts to pass overreaching bills like cap and trade. But we’ve also seen that voters generally don’t like to hear the excuse that “Congress is obstructing my agenda.” They respond to that, as we saw in 2014, by punishing the president’s party in the midterm — in that case quite severely with the loss of nine Senate seats.
It’s entirely possible that Obama’s regulatory state is holding us back so badly that just a few changes will knock the props out from under the wheels and the cart will start rolling down the hill effortlessly. Repeal the late regulations, start rewriting the earlier ones, reverse a few NLRB precedents and sign a few pipeline permits, and boom.
But it’s also possible that Trump won’t have the ability to change enough to make a difference. And every elected Republican from the president-elect to the dog catcher in Hillsdale County, Mich., has to be a bit nervous about how high expectations are right now. We see how people feel now, but how are they going to feel in six months if things haven’t changed?
This idea (made popular by liberals) that Democrats can’t win in midterms is just as false as the idea that Republicans can’t win in presidential years. It isn’t going to be easy for Trump to meet expectations this high, and there’s a lot at stake for his party.
