A Chapman University presidential forecast equation calls for a Republican presidential win in the November 2012 election.
The Anderson Center for Economic Research data does not identify specific candidates, only the incumbent from each party. And before you label this the fantasy of a GOP-leaning campus behind the fabled Orange Curtain, keep this in mind: the forecast has only been wrong once since 1944 (Kennedy vs. Nixon, 1960). It even predicted Al Gore's popular and George W. Bush's electoral victories in 2000.
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The model is based on the approval rating of the incumbent party's sitting president one year prior to the election, the percentage change in real gross domestic product (GDP) in the election year and the percentage change in employment in the election year, according to a Chapman University press release.
The forecast shows relatively weak growth in GDP (2.3 percent) and employment (1.1 percent) in 2012, but the real killah for Barack Obama is his 44 percent approval rating in November. No incumbent party candidate with an approval rating below 45 percent a year before the election has won the popular vote since 1944. The forecast has The Chosen One getting smoked by 8.1 percent.
While the forecast correctly predicted the popular vote outcome for 16 of the 17 presidential elections since 1944, Obama can cling to this: that equation had Richard Nixon winning the popular vote by a margin of 3.2 percent in 1960. Instead, Nixon lost it by 0.2 percent.
Of course, the university's model does not take into account dead people voting in Chicago. Hey, where is it Obama's from again?
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.