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Happy Election Year!

Only 364 days, and one fewer Republican frontrunner, to go

by
Marc Tracy
November 07, 2011
(The Awl)
(The Awl)

Today is November 7, 2011. The national elections will be held November 6, 2012. You do the math.

Nate Silver supplied an invaluable look at the race. His conclusion is that the fundamentals, and specifically the economy, hugely disfavor President Obama as he enters his re-election campaign. If Silver is seeing things correctly and if Obama’s Republican opponent is the comparatively moderate Mitt Romney and if the economy continues to stagnate, then Obama would lose more than four out of five times. (Team Obama’s response is to accuse Silver of erring in assessing Romney a far more moderate candidate than, say, Rick Perry or Herman Cain. “All of them would return to the failed economic policies that led us into recession,” the campaign says. Silver’s model gives Obama a better chance when his opponent is more conservative.)

And today was the day that Romney’s victory became yet more likely, with the most prominent accuser yet of Herman Cain, who remains Romney’s top competitor according to the polls, coming to the forefront. (Lest we forget, Cain is also the favorite son of Pamela Geller.) Sharon Bialek (relax, she’s from Chicago, my guess is she’s of Polish ancestry; her lawyer, however, is the famed Jewish feminist litigator Gloria Allred) says that in 1997 Cain sexually assaulted her in the course of offering her a job.

Oh, and Silver also had this to say:

Obama does indeed have a “Jewish problem.” Polls find that his standing among Jews has deteriorated: only about 54 percent of them approved of his performance in the most recent Gallup survey. But this is to be expected when a president has a 40-something approval rating. He also has a Hispanic problem and a problem among the white working class. He has a problem in Ohio and a problem in Florida and a problem in New Hampshire. He even has, to a mild extent, an African-American problem: Obama’s approval ratings among black voters are still high, but down to about 80 percent from 90 percent.



All of these, however, are symptoms of Obama’s larger problems … .

Which isn’t to imply that many will be saying “Ken for Cain.”

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.