….to God’s ears, Neil.

Isn’t that the big news of today?

The Dow is even up and you better believe Yahoo News is all over it!

I love me some Neilian meta-analysis, and this is good news.

How strong is the correlation, Neil?

model backtested to 1916 and in actual use has a MOE of about 2.7%, not bad at all. It would be even better if you tossed the ’92 numbers out (Perot. I suppose)
I talked to Fair about three weeks ago and he still sees a close election looking only at the popular vote. A very key thing for Pres Obama will be the number or lack of what Fair calls “good news” quarters where GDP grows more than 3.2% He has had one so far during his presidency. He has three more quarters left since the Q4-2012 obviously won’t factor into the election.
Also, Fair uses his own model to predict the US economy and told me it had been too optimistic so far. If you go to his link you can read his original article with updates to understand how the model works. You also can plug in different numbers to see what the EV is.
The latest CBO projections are bad news for O. We’ll see.
Interestingly the EV for generic Democrats in congrees is quite alarming for Dems.Also, Fair’s model cares not a hoot who the candidates are. It’s based strongly on the economy, war is a factor and incumbency is a weak factor.
Very interesting post.

…we need to return to federalism.

Now, though, conservative Democrats are gone, the Rockefeller Republicans are gone, and the nation is polarized. Democrats aren’t going to win Texas and Republicans aren’t going to win California.

Why continue to wage war over policy when we’ll never agre with one another? Better to return decision making to the states and leave only truly national policy with the Feds.

did Pethokoukis(one of my favorite economists) take into account the deliberate manipulation of the currency that is likely to happen in the second half of 2012? Obama will pull out all of the stops and the recent evidence is that Bernanke is his creature.

or just 1 as long as 0bama is deafeated.

and that is James is getting confused with the two surveys. The household survey has its own jobs created number each month (that is never reported), which is one of the factors in the unemployment rate. This job creation number has shown that since September we have added over 1.5 million new jobs (including 847k this month, although 200k of that were from the census revisions). Thus, if the household keeps outperforming, the scenario he needs to be looking at is the +>300k/month one.

Let’s not get cocky guys. The swingometer is a change to the whole country. McCain go 46% of the vote but lost the EC by 180 votes. If the country swings right by 11.8pts but, for example, pennsylvania, iowa, nh and new mexico only swing by 9 instead of 11.8 Obama will keep the White House. We have a lot of work to do.

I’d be weary of any map that suggests we pick up Pennsylvania without Santorum on the ticket. Who is to say they won’t blame the state republicans as much as the federal democrats?

It would have been nice to have a good conservative one.

No way Minnesota turns red.

would be a good choice for VP because he’s a smart guy that appeals to moderates and has zero baggage. He’s not a truly conservative though.

the media will play up the numbers. It doesn’t matter to them that along with the improved number today, the number of people NOT seeking work went up by huge numbers.

I was just listening to the John Bachelor show with Dan Henninger as his guest. Henninger spoke of the success that Obama seems to be having taking his SOTU speech, dud that it was on tv, on the road.

He said that 6,000 Intel workers in AZ were wildly cheering Obama with that speech, especially when he speaks of creating “An America that Lasts.”

As Henninger points out, the crowd was and educated (although young), yet still seemed not to understand that Obama was really running against his own record. He has the rhetorical chops to do it.

Personally, I feel it’s a race thing and a pop culture thing. 1) Americans, particularly the educated young, do NOT want to be the generation that turns out of office the first African-American elected to the Presidency. Every generation has its vanity, the lies it tells itself in order to maintain an inflated sense of self-worth: those of certain age groups lie to themselves that THEY are responsible for the historical election of the first minority President and they (esp. those with jobw) will protect that vanity at all costs.

2.) This President, as a black man (okay, a bi-racial man, but face it, few look at him that way), plays hoops, dances on Ellen, sings at the Apollo, and the young and the “cool” just can’t consider turning him out. Sad, but that is what matters to many who vote.

Henninger pointed out that Obama is hoping to present himself as the heart of American, knowing Romney or other GOPers will present themselves as the brains of Amerian. Heart trumps brains, unless the opponent keeps pointing out that no brains means no lasting jobs.

We are in a fix and it’s mostly a media-controlled fix.

What to do? I can’t see Romney’s team coming up with a strategy to beat Obama at his own game. They have to have game of their own, but I don’t know that Romney has the language that can speak to the brain of the American people.

I’m sure its something he keeps up a lot with and I trust West with this. He points out unemployment with blacks

While the overall unemployment rate is theortetically down to 8.3 percent with todays numbers — West notes in the black community unemployment was 15.8 percent and nw its down to 13.6.
____
“Can someone tell me how employment in the black community has improved at a rate three times the national average in just a few months??

And:

“There is something suspicious about the job numbers released today and it has me very concerned,” West wondered Friday. “Is this dramatic supposed decrease in black unemployment a result of job creation or is someone playing around with the census numbers??”
____

Does smell like someone is trying to make things all rosy for an upcoming election. Not sure if even the swingometer can take into account something like fudging.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/208613-rep-west-responds-to-jobs-report-someone-messing-with-census-numbers

And regardless, I’d rather go down swinging and keep my dignity than hold my nose for someone without a core ideology.

Obama has a sizable lead over everyone else there.

His analysis uses job growth as a percentage of the population. And he finds that historically, it correlates more with the outcome of the election than most other economic factors.

His analysis for this year comes out this way: If job growth remains at or above 155,000 jobs per month, Obama is favored to win re-election. Below that number, not so much.

http://tinyurl.com/7jvm5pv

One more thing. Silver points out that economic forecasts do NOT include the issue of a candidate who completely screws up in front of the voters, like McGovern did in 1972.

It’s usually true that the candidate is less important than fundamental factors like the economy–but not if the candidate is so far out of the mainstream that the voters just can’t stomach him or her.

The most recent example is Sharron Angle, who totally botched a totally winnable election by acting as someone the Independent voters just couldn’t accept.

And IMO, Newt Gingrich is this year’s version of Sharron Angle.

NV, and MI be in our column, and maybe even WI?

A friend of mine pointed out that as we get closer to the election that the news media will talk up the economy? Also hasn’t Holder basically given a green light to groups like the New Black Panthers that he won’t go after black on white voter intimdation? That the Democrats won’t pull out every dirty trick in the book to get Obama reelected. My friend feels that the whole debate and primary process is all for naught that Obama has it in the bag for a second term. He hopes he is wrong and I do too, but he is convinced he is right. Please tell me he wrong. Give me something to back my conviction up with, please.

to have cruised to victory in 2004 based on economic projections. Instead, it was a nail biter. Should Gore have not cruised to victory in 2000 based on the economy?

Perhaps there was a time when the economy was a great indicator of electoral outcomes. But now economic news is reported much less honestly. And while my eyes glaze over trying to sort out the details over whether this 1.2 million drop in the labor force was or was not legitimate, there may actually have been a significant drop in unemployment. People will almost certainly perceive it that way at any rate.

This election will probably have to be won on a message of Obamacare and economic liberty. Republicans better wise up to that instead of hoping for an anemic economy to do their job for them.

Ron Brownstein just wrote an article in the L.A. Times along these lines. Obama is incredibly vulnerable this year.

He did not tack to the center as Clinton and Bush did in their first terms. Obama has courted the support of wealthy liberals like George Soros, Haim Saban, Barbara Streisand, Oprah, and Steve Bing.

Obama’s policies are far more friendly to environmental extremists than to regular folks who just want to earn a living and have the kind of life that their parents had or slightly better.

A lot of people are out of work. If a Republican president were carrying this type of economy around as baggage, the media would have already written his post-mortem and all of the focus would be on how great the coming utopia would be under a far-left democrat bent on “fixing” all of the problems caused by Republicans.

Even with the media squarely in his corner, Obama will have a hard time getting re-elected. His is the most inept president we have ever had. He has gotten the U.S. into so much debt that it will be difficult for us to recover. Any Republican who has a workable plan to get us out of debt has my attention, and eventually will have my vote. The solution cannot be either (1) borrow more money, or (2) increase entitlement spending. The solution must involve massive cuts to spending on a level never seen before in American history.

it’s great to see the swing-o-meter getting fired up for what will be a long,hard slog of a campaign.