Florida's Jobless Rate To Impact Obama's Re-Election Campaign
MIAMI (CBSMiami/AP) — The nation's unemployment rate of 8.2 percent may sink President Barack Obama's re-election bid, but one detail brightens his hopes. About 10 battleground states will decide the election, and seven of them have employment levels that beat the U.S. average.
That doesn't guarantee a second term, of course. But it's a reminder that the national rate, from a purely political standpoint, is not necessarily the be-all, end-all statistic.
Florida's unemployment rate has dropped steadily for nearly a year, but at 8.7 percent still tops the national average. North Carolina's rate is even worse, and Nevada has the highest, 11.7 percent.
If Obama were to carry all the competitive states where the employment rate is brighter than the national average — New Hampshire, Iowa, Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Colorado — he would win re-election handily. But if he loses the battleground states where the rate now exceeds 7 percent, an oft-cited threshold that may mean nothing, Romney would prevail because he would take Ohio, Pennsylvania and Colorado, plus Florida, North Carolina and Nevada.
Most of the states are led by Republican governors eager to highlight their progress in creating jobs. That complicates GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's claim that the economy has been so mismanaged that Obama deserves to be ousted.
In addition, a chief Romney criticism, that Obama is hindering energy production, is undermined by robust drilling for natural gas that's creating jobs and some wealthy landowners in two important states, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
In Ohio, the quintessential toss-up state and practically a must-win for Romney, Republican Gov. John Kasich tries to finesse the political dilemma by saying jobs have increased despite Obama's policies.
"We fight like crazy to outperform the federal government," he told reporters last week in the Statehouse in Columbus. "We have. We're down to 7.4 percent unemployment."
But Ohio can't continually buck the national trend, Kasich said, and he warned of a likely drop in job growth soon, largely due to gridlock and uncertainty in Washington. "Rome is on fire and it's singeing places like Ohio," he said. "We'll go our own way, but the headwinds are kicking up again."
Romney campaign also must cope with boasts, often by Republicans and business leaders, that things are much better at the local level than in other regions.
"Midwest has economy on right track," said an op-ed headline last week in The Columbus Dispatch. Stephen D. Steinour, president of Huntington Bancshares, wrote: "The Midwest is not only resurgent, it is leading the national economic recovery."
Several political scientists' studies have concluded that voters are less influenced by local and state economic trends than by national statistics. Also, U.S. unemployment climbed so sharply, starting in mid-2008, that even a steady decline over the past year still leaves millions without jobs.
(TM and © Copyright 2012 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2012 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
