Of course the economy matters...that’s why Americans will be fed a steady diet of misinformation touting the great success of our recovery from now til election day. Sadly many of us are stupid enough to believe the lies...even though the awful truth of our economic condition is obvious to anyone with their eyes open! The only thing that will sway some people will be a complete economic collapse.
I’m sorry I did a simple Excel regression analysis of VEWB vs. “Win/Lose”, coded 1/0 and there is only a very weak dependence, 0.04% for each point of VEWB, but the significance is only 0.49, meaning that the value of regression is no much more likely than if we had picked results (0/1) at random. VEWB is not a significant predictor.
To remove sensitivity to saturation caused by 1/0 coding I repeated the analysis using popular vote and here the results were even less encouraging. A one point change in VEWB is associated with about a 1% reduction in popular vote, but the significance is only 0.2, which means that 4 out of five times we would expect as least as strong a correlation purely by chance.
VEWB is not a useful predictor, imho.
The media may not be able to hide what is bad with happy reports if the gas prices continue to rise.Unemployment will surely go higher if gas hits $4+ not to mention grocery prices and everything else that is shipped.THat stuff is hard to hide when you see it in your grocery budget and at the gas pump.
An we should believe these "improved" numbers, especially since the revelation that when the benefits run out, those unemployed just disappear, why?