Election Forecasts - FiveThirtyEight Blog - NYTimes.com
It must suck even more than usual to be a right wing nut about now.
Who?
And no Pres has one [sic] election with over 8% UE
cept maybe fdr
And before that, the number was 5%, until Reagan won with 7.4.
And there's always the possibility we can dip below 8% before November.
The problem with this kind of reasoning is the only three examples we have of an incumbant losing with a high number are Carter (7.5) Ford (7.7) and Bush-41 (7.3) All close to where Reagan was, actually.
Ford wasn't really an incumbant, and he barely lost, but what probably did him in was that he pardoned Nixon.
Carter and Bush-41 had the problem of facing a third party challenger that sapped their base. That probably had as much to do with them losing as the UE rate.
Carter also had a hostage crisis, gas lines, double digit inflation, double digit interest rates etc.
So having not pardoned an unpopular predecessor, faced a third party challenge or had other crisis to deal with, all Obama has is an unemployment rate that is bad, but not as bad as it was.
But the key thing is, Obama doesn't have a challenger of the caliber of Reagan or Clinton. He has a Weird Mormon Robot who isn't even liked by his own party.
