On the Maddeningly Inexact Relationship Between Unemployment and Re-Election

By NATE SILVER
NYT

Make no mistake: the higher the unemployment rate in November 2012, the less likely President Obama is to win a second term.

But we should be careful about asserting that there is any particular threshold at which Mr. Obama would go from favorite to underdog, or any magic number at which his re-election would either become impossible or a fait accompli. Historically, the relationship between the unemployment rate and a president’s performance on Election Day is complicated and tenuous.

An article in today’s Times notes, for example, that “no American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent.” That was the unemployment rate in November 1984, when Ronald Reagan resoundingly won a second term.

This type of data may be of limited use for predictive purposes, however. Reagan won re-election by 18 points, suggesting that he had quite a bit of slack. An unemployment rate of 7.5 percent or even higher would presumably have been good enough to win him another term.

(More here.)