Good news for Barack Obama today! Um, sort of. Ray Fair has released a forecast of the 2012 presidential race based on his well-known political/econometric model, and he says Obama will win in a landslide.
That is, he’ll win in a landslide if Ray Fair is also good at forecasting future economic growth:
It thus comes down to what the economy will be in the next two years, which is, of course, what the equations are all about. If the recovery is robust, which my economic model predicts will begin to happen in the middle of 2011, Obama wins easily. If
the recovery is only modest, the election will be close, with an edge for the Republicans. If there is a double dip recession, Obama loses by a fairly large amount.
His topline forecast is that Obama wins 55.88% of the popular vote, which sounds reasonable for an incumbent president presiding over a robust economy. But if recovery is fairly flat, which is hardly out of the question, suddenly Republicans are favored to win the White House.
With that in mind, then, what was it we were saying yesterday about Republican incentives relative to the economy? Mitch McConnell made their priorities clear a few weeks ago, after all: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” If Ray Fair is to be believed, there’s only one way for that to happen.
