<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://conventions.nationaljournal.com/archives/2004/08/election_foreca_1.html">http://conventions.nationaljournal.com/archives/2004/08/election_foreca_1.html</a> August 29, 2004 <span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 12pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; color: rgb(51, 51, 102);">Election Forecasts: A Numbers Game Posted by Charlie Cook ... To my mind, the most important figure to emerge in recent days was the revised second-quarter GDP figure, which dropped to 2.8 percent, the slowest growth rate in over a year and the lowest since the first quarter of 2003. According to Abramowitz, since 1948, the average second-quarter growth rate in a presidential election year is 3.9 percent. The average real GDP growth rate in a year in which an incumbent won is 6.3 percent; the average when an incumbent lost is 1.5 percent. When the economic growth rate has been 4 percent or greater in the second quarter, the incumbent party has won seven of the last eight elections, Abramowitz points out, the exception being the Democrats' loss in 1968. When the economy has grown by less than 4 percent in the second quarter, the incumbent party has lost five elections out of six, the exception being President Eisenhower's re-election in 1956. The current economic growth rate is a lot closer to the rate in years when incumbents lose than it is to years when incumbents win. </body> </html>