The difficulty of managing expectations
Check out this new research from Gallup, which has a near record divergence between satisfaction with personal lives, and satisfaction with the direction of the country overall:
As both the article and the graph point out, there is a consistent gap between personal satisfaction and satisfaction over the direction of the country since Gallup began the polling in 1979, driven largely but not exclusively by party identification.
At our current moment there are dueling theories about why everyone feels so badly about the economy. Nate Cohn draws a straight line between perceptions of the economy and confidence in the Biden administration. Paul Krugman claims that the media, especially right-wing media, is over-indexing on stories about inflation.
Either way, we’re in a moment that illustrates the difficulty of expectation setting and the power of narrative—and especially the narrative reinforcement mechanisms inherent to our current media ecosystem. The Biden administration may have declared victory over the pandemic too soon in the summer of 2021, as vaccinations were rolling out and guidance around mask-wearing started to change. The public (yours truly included), desperate for some pandemic relief, was all too willing to accept some good news. Then delta, then Afghanistan, then anti-vax protests, then inflation, then omicron.
By most economic measures, the economy is actually pretty good right now, better than most economists predicted it would be in 2020. But try telling that to someone who is already pandemic fatigued, constantly hears about inflation on the news, and experiences it in their shopping cart.
The mood of the country can turn around, but it’ll take some consistent good news—and better expectations management. With pandemic measures just kind of fizzling out, and the double whammy of inflation and rising interest rates over the next few months, I think the Biden administration is going to have a rough time of it for the rest of 2022. Godspeed to their comms team.