“I doubt very much that he’s going to much of anything,” McCullough said. “I just wanted to see if there could be a change … I didn’t want the same thing that we’ve had for eight years. And I think that’s what was going to happen.”

Her patience is short. “He’s got four years,” she said. “He’d better do something in four years.”

White voters without a college degree, a group that makes up the core of Trump’s support, has been a bit pessimistic about the future for some time. A Pew Research report published this summer found that more than two-thirds of Trump supporters predicted the next generation would be worse off than today. These new results, showing nearly half of Trump voters feeling more optimistic about life getting better in their communities, would seem to indicate an improving mood.

But it falls short of the confidence you’d might expect to see if Trump’s supporters actually believed all his campaign promises. Many agreed with a few things, including his pitch that a Trump presidency was the Republican’s final chance, possibly forever, to win the White House and secure the future of the country. About two-thirds of his voters agreed that 2016 was America’s last opportunity to arrest an irrevocable decline.

And they certainly were happy when he won, with half saying they felt excited, and nearly four in 10 feeling satisfied. But their confidence in the future, while elevated, certainly didn’t skyrocket.

That may be because they’re busy thinking about the present. Mark Blair, a truck driver from Iowa, said he cared most about what the next president will do to reduce regulation, and how they’ll help entrepreneurs like himself. He liked the way Trump handled himself, and his dislike of Clinton sealed the deal. Concern about the future of his local community didn’t enter the picture. “I don’t know what he can do in my area,” he said. “I was more concerned about my business.”

The election also unveiled a telling split in what Americans think about the United States electoral system. On the whole, most Trump supporters said biased media coverage was the campaign’s biggest problem—unsurprising, given their candidate’s constant complaints about coverage. Clinton voters, on the other hand, were more likely to be concerned about the influence of money in politics, or low voter participation. Neither side cared much about voter fraud: Only 6 percent of Republicans and 5 percent of Democrats said it was a problem.

Democrats, by the way, have always been a bit sunnier about the future. In the Pew survey cited earlier, around two-thirds of Democrats thought things would get better in America, or at least stay the same. Those figures didn’t shift all that much in the PRRI survey, with 71 percent saying the quality of life in their local communities would improve, or at least stay the same.