14+ months out...

Washington Whispers (usnews.com):

Allan Lichtman, the American University professor whose election formula has correctly called every president since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election, has a belated birthday present for Barack Obama: Rest easy, your re-election is in the bag.

“Even if I am being conservative, I don’t see how Obama can lose,” says Lichtman, the brains behind The Keys to the White House.

Rasmussen Reports:

President Obama earns his lowest level of support yet against a generic Republican in a hypothetical 2012 election match-up for the week ending Sunday, August 28.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely U.S. Voters finds the generic Republican earning 48% of the vote, while the president picks up support from 40%. Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate, and eight percent (8%) are undecided.

14 months is a long time in political terms. From our current vantage point, it's absolutely possible that Obama will win re-election, and it's absolutely possible that he'll lose. (I don't think that those are equally likely results, but they're both possible.) And Professor Lichtman's work is interesting, and something that I've watched over the last several cycles. But it's also an exercise in curve-fitting, the kind of model that works perfectly every time, right up until the time that it doesn't. I'll take the time, at some point in the future, to walk through his 13 keys and address the ways that I think he's wrong here, but for today, these are just a pair of interesting contradictory indicators...