washington, dc

The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: November 2012

Why Obama is Going to Win

The following, vimeo by Stan Greenberg is cross-posted from the Carville-Greenberg Memo:
James and I are ready to put down our marker: President Obama is going to win re-election on Tuesday. Although many pundits are calling the race a tossup, our last national tracking survey shows the president clearly ahead. President Obama has all of the momentum, he holds leads in the key swing states, and he is on track to score a comfortable victory in the electoral college:


Obama closing with a 4-point lead

The following is cross-posted from a DCorps e-blast (survey questionnaire here, graphs here):

The final national survey for Democracy Corps shows Obama ahead with a 4-point lead in the presidential race, 49 to 45 percent (actually, 3.8 points to be exact). This represents a slight improvement since our last poll, which fielded before the final presidential debate, when we had Obama ahead by 2 points among all voters but tied among the smaller likely electorate. With the enthusiasm gap narrowed and Obama almost back to 2008 levels of support with the new Democratic base of unmarried women and minorities, the President has brought this back to the contours that gave him the lead before the debates – and that is enough to win, especially since he has a 7-point lead in the 12-state battleground for the presidency.
Obama closes this race with more voters saying they approve of him and the direction he is taking the country. More than half of all likely voters (52 percent) approve of the President’s job performance and warm feelings toward him are up 3 points. This survey also finds more optimism about the country–42 percent now say the country is headed in the right direction and warm feelings about the economy are up 3 points.
Romney still has an enthusiasm advantage: 59 percent of his voters say they are following the race very closely, compared to 52 percent of Obama’s. But as we have seen in some other polls, Obama’s voters have become much more certain of their preference – Obama ‘loyalists’ are up 4 points to 42 percent – reflecting a 5-point advantage over Romney in loyalist support.
Romney maintains a 3-point advantage on the economy and has kept Obama’s youth vote under 60 percent. He is winning two-to-one among white non-college voters, with Obama’s vote at 32 percent and below 2008. Romney has a 4-point lead among independents.
Despite the day-to-day battles, Romney is being pushed back by his own party’s brand: Obama has a 7-point advantage on warm feelings over Romney (53 percent to 46 percent); the Democratic Party is 7 points more popular than the Republican Party; and the Democrats in Congress have a 6-point advantage over the Republican Congress in favorability(39 to 33 percent).
The keys to Obama’s lead going into tomorrow’s vote include:
· The new Democratic base (Rising American Electorate) gives Obama 65 percent (4 points short of 2008).
· Unmarried women are now voting 66 percent for Obama (4 points short of 2008).
· Obama’s higher approval is pushed up by a 20-point advantage on ‘having the better temperament to deal with a natural disaster.’ Two-thirds are more confident of the government’s ability to handle a natural disaster now compared to Katrina.
And, for the record, voters reached on a cell phone supported Obama by 10 points, while the landline respondents gave Obama only a 1-point lead.


Political Strategy Notes

Nate Silver forecasts that President Obama is on track to win 307 electoral votes in light of the latest polling data, cites 13 latest major polls, none of which show Romney ahead in the nation-wide popular vote. Only one shows a 1 point gain for Romney (Battleground Politico) to a tie in the popular vote nationwide (two others show a tie, Rasmussen and CNN).
At HuffPo Pollster Mark Blumenthal writes: “In all, HuffPost Pollster has entered over 120 new statewide polls into our database over the past week, most in the closely contested battlegrounds. This new data has done little to alter the overall polling snapshot, which continues to favor Obama in contested states like Wisconsin, Nevada, Iowa and Ohio by margins of 2 to 4 percentage points. The electoral votes from these four states, combined with those from other states where Obama leads Romney by wider margins, would give the President 277 electoral votes, just over the 270 need to win.”
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes has an illuminating interview with Slate.com’s Sasha Issenberg on the Obama campaign’s edge in the front porch campaign and high tech GOTV.
Silver explains “Romney’s Reason to Play for Pennsylvania.” Silver says “Given the number of unappealing options for Mr. Romney, however, it may be worth a try. Pennsylvania still ranks seventh on the FiveThirtyEight list of tipping-point states — and that is without considering the mechanics of early voting. Pennsylvania has little early voting, meaning that a larger share of the vote there is still in play.” But Democratic strategist Bob Shrum says Pennsylvania is always fool`s gold for the Republicans.”
National Journal’s Hotline on Call’s staff update sees it this way: “Depending who you ask, Romney’s decision to visit to Pennsylvania within 48 hours of Election Day speaks to one of two beliefs: That the state is seriously in play and must be contested, or that Ohio has slipped away and a last-minute map expansion is necessary to keep Romney’s electoral hopes alive. It may be a little of both…But the location of Romney’s rally is notable: In targeting the vote-rich suburbs of Philadelphia in eastern Pennsylvania — rather than the blue collar areas around Pittsburgh on the state’s west side…”
At Alternet, Lynn Stuart Parramore’s “Don’t Believe the Hype: The Gender Gap Still Favors Obama, Big-time” is a good rebuttal to Romney campaign spin about their momentum with women voters. Parramore cites recent polls showing Obama with a 17 percent edge with Virginia women and a 12 percent gender gap in Ohio.
Sahil Kapur reports at Talking Points Memo on the emerging Republican whine, “It’s Sandy’s fault.”
Politicians should note that the highest-turnout constituency, seniors, has definitely gone digital. According to a survey by the Pew Internet Project, in 2012 — for the first time — more than half of all those age 65 or older are online, and over a third are active in social networking. More than two-thirds of them now have cell phones, including 13 percent with smartphones.
Jamelle Bouie explains at The American Prospect why you shouldn’t worry so much about “the undecideds.”
In her Huffpo post “Don’t Be Fooled by a Moderate Mitt ,” Jane White has the relevant statistics which show which party is the sworn enemy of bipartisanship: “And when it comes to gridlock on Capitol Hill, the finger of blame points squarely at the GOP. While one of Romney’s ads blames Obama for not reaching out to work with congressional Republicans, it’s the Republicans Congress that has racked up the highest number of filibusters in American history. During Obama’s first term there were 246 cloture motions filed to end Republican filibusters compared to 133 during Dubya’s first term. Not even a handful of “sensible” Republicans had the guts to break ranks and vote with the Democrats.”
How much longer will Florida voters put up with Governor Scott’s disgusting restrictions on early voting? Here’s an update on the outrage in Florida, and the lawsuit to stop it.
At the Princeton Election Consortium, Sam Wang has a nifty “Election Night Scenario tracking Tool.”
Washington Post Outlook is running a Crystal Ball contest predicting the electoral vote outcome, with an eclectic group of 13 pundits. Some of the more interesting predictions: Chris Cillizza – Obama 277 EVs; Mad Money’s Jim Kramer – Obama 440 EVs; National Journal’s Hotline Editor Reid Wilson – Obama 294 EVs. A meteorologist, poker player and a Mclean, VA high school also weigh in. 11 of 13 pick Obama to win the electoral college vote.


Creamer: Big Progressive Turnout Needed to Stop Romney World

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo.
My wife, Jan Schakowsky, and I are friends with a wonderful woman named Bea. Bea is now 95 years old. Bea was born in 1917.
She was born in a country where women couldn’t vote. In some areas of the country, just fifty years before, slavery had been legal. Collective bargaining was not recognized under the law. Poverty was rampant – especially among the country’s oldest citizens.
Bea was born in a country where there was an unimaginable gulf between a few fabulously wealthy oligarchs, and the masses of ordinary people. It was a country where only a tiny fraction of the population ever went to college – or even graduated from high school – a country were hardly anyone was considered “middle class.” It was a country where there were few regulations to protect health and safety on the job, no national child labor laws, no federal minimum wage, and very little to prevent corporations from recklessly destroying the environment.
Bea was born in a country where people of color were considered second-class citizens and discrimination against them was enshrined into law – a country where gays and homosexuals could be prosecuted for their sexual orientation.
Bea was born in the United States of America.
Over her lifetime, Bea has been involved in many of the great social movements of our time – movements that helped transform our country into the envy of the world.
She was active building the labor unions that build the middle class. won a living wage, weekends and a 40-hour work week, pensions for retirement, and the passage of Social Security and Medicare that ensured a retirement free of poverty.
She marched with the civil rights movement that gave people of color an equal status in American society.
Bea became a public school teacher and helped educate an ever-expanding number of ordinary Americans – watching more and more of them go on to college to fulfill their dreams.
She was part of the women’s movement that demanded equal status and equal pay for women – as well as the right for women to control their own decisions about contraception and abortion.
This year, Bea – at 95 years old – is working on a phone bank to turn out voters for Barack Obama. She says that if Mitt Romney and the Republican Right win the election on Tuesday, they have made clear that they absolutely intend to destroy all of the things for which she has struggled her entire life. She’s right.
Mitt Romney has demonstrated over the years that he has only one real core value: his own success.
Throughout his career, Mitt has demonstrated that he will do whatever is necessary to benefit himself – and his investors. At Bain Capital he didn’t flinch when it came to destroying other people’s jobs and lives if it would make him and his investors money.
Now his “investors” are the oligarchs of the Republican Right -people like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson — who, between them, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get him elected. Many are the same people who funded the Tea Party movement. Others are the Wall Street hedge fund barons whose recklessness collapsed the economy and came very close to recreating a Great Depression.
These people – and their Tea Party allies in Congress – have shown the country that they have no intention of compromise. They are intent upon rolling back all of the things Bea has fought for – on sending us back to the Gilded Age. They truly believe that America would be a better place without labor unions. They want to eliminate Medicare and replace it with vouchers of ever-shrinking value that pay private insurance companies.
They want to be free to despoil the environment, do away with public education, eliminate jobs, cut wages, and continue to appropriate every dime of economic growth that is generated by our increasingly productive labor force.


Westen: Progressive Messaging Will Win Middle-Class Support

From Drew Westen’s New York Times article, “America’s Leftward Tilt?“:

…Whichever candidate wins, the first order of business will be deciding which programs to cut — unless a deal to prevent us from going over the fiscal cliff is reached during the lame-duck session of Congress after the election. Most voters intuitively understand that jobs and deficits are linked — too much of an emphasis on deficits leads to too few jobs — because working people with money in their wallets drive demand, whereas wealthier people with money in their wallets drive Jaguars (and send the rest of their income to their hedge fund managers). Even in the heart of red America, people understand that high unemployment and income disparities of the magnitude we are now witnessing are bad for economic growth.
But you have to speak in a way that brings out their inner Keynes, as I discovered when testing the following message in the Deep South: “The only way to cut the deficit is to put Americans back to work.” That message beat the toughest austerity message by over 30 points.
The reality is that our government hasn’t become this dysfunctional because the parties are so “polarized.” It’s because there is only one pole in American politics today, and its magnetic field is so powerful that it has drawn both parties in the same direction — rightward. And it is in that same direction that the magnetic field of contemporary American politics is likely to pull the stories the two parties tell after the election — and the policies the winner pursues.
The data, however, suggest just the opposite — that both candidates have benefited in the general election every time they have taken a left turn. President Obama was in deep political trouble 15 months ago when he cut the closest thing he could to a “grand bargain” with House Speaker John A. Boehner to slash the federal budget by trillions, and he did nothing for his popularity nine months earlier when he extended the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy. Not until he began talking like a populist did he begin picking up steam in the polls. Indeed, one of the most powerful messages the Democrats chose not to use in the 2010 midterm elections — which would have supported a policy that was extremely popular then and remains as popular now — was a simple message on taxes I tested nationally, which won in every region and with every demographic, including Tea Partyers: “In tough times like these, millionaires ought to be giving to charity, not getting it.” Once that position (and other populist appeals) became central to Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign, the election looked like it would be a rout.

Westen goes on to note that a leftward tilt — from the hard right towards the center — also helped Romney: “For both men, a pragmatic left-hand turn helped them steer their way toward a middle class desperate for hope.” Westen argues that there is always a powerful pull to the right driven by cash infusions into politics. Yet only by embracing progressive policies can presidential candidates win broad popular support. As Westen concludes, “In other words, if the candidate who wins takes a left turn like the one that won him the presidency, the Reagan era would finally be over. We can only hope.”


Election Countdown: Day 4

Another day of evidence that all the talk about “Mitt-Mentum” was cloaking a very different reality. Here are some items from the posting at Washington Monthly today that are of particular interest to the TDS community.
* The Mourdock disaster, which probably ended Republican fantasies of retaking the Senate, an abiding reminder of the “human error factor” in this era of professionalized campaigns.
* All the scrutiny of raw numbers in early voting may miss bigger issue of which side is best turning out “sporadic” or “low-propensity” voters.
* Parallels between Bush and Romney escalated greatly by Mitt’s version of “uniter-not-divider” pitch.
* Critical California ballot initiative going down to the wire.


Wow. The Washington Post flat-out savages Romney today – says his only consistency is “contempt for the electorate”

Here’s the key section of today’s editorial in the WaPo:

THROUGH ALL THE flip-flops, there has been one consistency in the campaign of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney: a contempt for the electorate.
How else to explain his refusal to disclose essential information? Defying recent bipartisan tradition, he failed to release the names of his bundlers — the high rollers who collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. He never provided sufficient tax returns to show voters how he became rich.
How, other than an assumption that voters are too dim to remember what Mr. Romney has said across the years and months, to account for his breathtaking ideological shifts? He was a friend of immigrants, then a scourge of immigrants, then again a friend. He was a Kissingerian foreign policy realist, then a McCain-like hawk, then a purveyor of peace. He pioneered Obamacare, he detested Obamacare, then he found elements in it to cherish. Assault weapons were bad, then good. Abortion was okay, then bad. Climate change was an urgent problem; then, not so much. Hurricane cleanup was a job for the states, until it was once again a job for the feds.
The same presumption of gullibility has infused his misleading commercials (see: Jeep jobs to China) and his refusal to lay out an agenda. Mr. Romney promised to replace the Affordable Care Act but never said with what. He promised an alternative to President Obama’s lifeline to young undocumented immigrants but never deigned to describe it.
And then there has been his chronic, baldly dishonest defense of mathematically impossible budget proposals. He promised to cut income tax rates without exploding the deficit or tilting the tax code toward the rich — but he refused to say how he could bring that off. When challenged, he cited “studies” that he maintained proved him right. But the studies were a mix of rhetoric, unrealistic growth projections and more serious economics that actually proved him wrong…
…[Romney] seems to be betting that voters have no memories, poor arithmetic skills and a general inability to look behind the curtain. We hope the results Tuesday prove him wrong.


Paul Krugman on the GOP’s political strategy: “blackmail” and “protection racket politics

In his New York Times column today titled “the Blackmail Caucus“, Paul Krugman puts his finger on the real issue in this election:

….Lately, however, I’ve seen a growing number of Romney supporters making a quite different argument. Vote for Mr. Romney, they say, because if he loses, Republicans will destroy the economy.
O.K., they don’t quite put it that way. The argument is phrased in terms of “partisan gridlock,” as if both parties were equally extreme. But they aren’t. This is, in reality, all about appeasing the hard men of the Republican Party.
…During the first two years of Mr. Obama’s presidency, when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, Republicans offered scorched-earth opposition to anything and everything he proposed. Among other things, they engaged in an unprecedented number of filibusters, turning the Senate — for the first time — into a chamber in which nothing can pass without 60 votes.
And, when Republicans took control of the House, they became even more extreme. The 2011 debt ceiling standoff was a first in American history: An opposition party declared itself willing to undermine the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, with incalculable economic effects, unless it got its way.
And the looming fight over the “fiscal cliff” is more of the same. Once again, the G.O.P. is threatening to inflict large damage on the economy unless Mr. Obama gives it something — an extension of tax cuts for the wealthy — that it lacks the votes to pass through normal constitutional processes.
Would a Democratic Senate offer equally extreme opposition to a President Romney? No, it wouldn’t. So, yes, there is a case that “partisan gridlock” would be less damaging if Mr. Romney won.
But are we ready to become a country in which “Nice country you got here. Shame if something were to happen to it” becomes a winning political argument? I hope not. By all means, vote for Mr. Romney if you think he offers the better policies. But arguing for Mr. Romney on the grounds that he could get things done veers dangerously close to accepting protection-racket politics, which have no place in American life.

In making this argument, Krugman deflates the pro-Romney argument based on the urgent need for a “Grand Bargain” on the budget.

But would Mr. Obama be able to negotiate a Grand Bargain on the budget? Probably not — but so what? America isn’t facing any kind of short-run fiscal crisis, except in the fevered imagination of a few Beltway insiders. If you’re worried about the long-run imbalance between spending and revenue, well, that’s an issue that will have to be resolved eventually, but not right away.

He then makes an absolutely central point:

Furthermore, I’d argue that any alleged Grand Bargain would be worthless as long as the G.O.P. remained as extreme as it is, because the next Republican president, following the lead of George W. Bush, would just squander the gains on tax cuts and unfunded wars.

This final point is one that has been totally missing in the current debate. Every single solitary call for a “Grand Bargain” implicitly assumes that the Republicans will keep their end of any bargain they negotiate if they are returned to power or at some point obtain some temporary political leverage. Yet the explicit, fundamental and official philosophy of the movement conservatives who now dominate the GOP is that any compromises they may make of their ultimate goals are simply tactical and have absolutely no binding moral or political force.
The consequence is simple. So long as the GOP remains committed to its current extremist philosophy, they can be absolutely and completely trusted — trusted to never, ever, ever genuinely respect the terms of any “Grand Bargain” that they might negotiate. At the very best any so-called “Grand Bargain” will be a temporary two or four year deal, renewable at the GOP’s exclusive option.
As a result, the only viable road – the only road — to a “Grand Bargain” on the budget must begin with the defeat of the political extremism that now dominates the GOP. And the first step toward achieving that goal is the defeat of Mitt Romney in next Tuesday’s election.


Lux: Surprises More Likely to Benefit Dems

The following article by Democratic Strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
I have been doing politics full time for over 30 years now, and in most of those elections, even the full-time pols with great insider polling and analysis to look at had some big surprises when the results came in. Sometimes these surprises were on individual races, but much of the time, they were on the overall election pattern.
In 1980, my first election year working politics, most of the experts said the Presidential race would be tight, and no one predicted the kind of tide that swept in a Republican Senate. In 1984, everyone rightly predicted the Reagan landslide, but few people thought that two of the most openly progressive Senators elected in the last half century (Tom Harkin and Paul Simon) would buck the trend and upset Republican incumbents in the Senate. In 1986, few experts predicted the Democrats would win most of the close races and retake the Senate. In 1990, pundits were surprised by the level of backlash against (the first) Bush and the number of seats Democrats picked up. In 1992, most politicos predicted Perot would fade in the end- few thought he would get 19 percent of the vote. In 1994, the experts knew Democrats would have a bad year, but almost no one predicted the Republicans would win both houses of Congress. In 1998, with the Lewinsky scandal looming over the political landscape, most predictions were for Republican pick-ups of 20 to 30 House seats; when the Democrats instead picked up 5, embarrassed Republicans stripped Newt Gingrich of his Speakership. In 2000, The Bush team was so confident going into election weekend that they were having Bush campaigning for other Republicans — they never expected the high levels of African-American turnout that caused the close election in FL and meant that most other swing states went for Gore. In 2004, everyone was blown away by the high levels of Republican base turnout, in swing states and nationwide, that not only allowed Bush to win but swept in several new Republican Senators. In 2006 and 2008 both, people generally knew it was going to be a Democratic year, but almost no one predicted that Democrats would win almost every close Senate race and go from 45 to 51 in 2006, and 51 to 60 in 2008. And in 2010, everyone knew there would be a strong Republican tide, but few predicted that it would be so historically big that it would mean a 63 seat pick-up in the House.
If you look at the patterns in all these elections, it isn’t that the polling is necessarily so far off or that the predictions get all the big things wrong. But in politics, a little change here and a little change there can mean a big difference. It’s why no matter how expert you are that no one in this business is ever 100 percent on the mark. Very modest changes in who turns out and how different demographic groups break really matter, and even a last-minute change of 1 percent can swing a whole bunch of elections. Remember too that polling is always 24-48 hours behind what is actually happening in the real world, which if something is starting to move really matters. And polling, of course, doesn’t do a very good job of measuring on-the-ground field ops effectiveness.
One other factor which has an impact on the surprise thing is an intangible which is hard to measure or account for in advance, or even figure out why after the election in the post-mortem: in many election cycles, one party or another wins most of the close races. And it doesn’t necessarily have all that much to do with which party is having the better year overall. To add to the complication factor, in several recent cycles, one party has won most of the close Senate races and the other most of the close House races: in 2006, for example, which was a very Democratic year overall, we Dems won every close Senate seat but one, yet lost over 60 percent of the closest House races- even though we picked up 31 seats and won back the House, we still left more seats than we should have on the table. If they are the ones to win, party committees will sometimes argue that that their superior field and communications operations were the reasons they won the close ones, but I have never seen any hard evidence of that one way or another. I am sure there is a lot of random luck to the whole phenomena. But I will say this: in most of the elections of the last few cycles, the party having a better year won at least most of the close Senate races. 2010, where Ds and Rs split the closest races, was actually the big exception. In 2002 and 2004, the Republicans won most of the closest races; in 2000, 2006, and 2008, Democrats won most of the closest.
So will 2012 give us some surprises? Almost certainly. The thing about surprises is that they are hard to predict, but the biggest surprise for me would be an election result that looked exactly like the current polling and prognostication predicts.
My great fear, naturally, is that Gallup and Rasmussen could put all the other pollsters to shame, the undecideds could all break against the incumbent, and Romney could end up winning by several percentage points and sweeping in a Republican Senate. But I am feeling optimistic today, so my guess is that the surprises could very well be on our side of the ledger.
One gut feeling I have is that we may end up a little further ahead nationally and in most of the swing states than it now looks. I tend to agree with Greenberg’s argument on cell phones being under-polled in a lot of the national polling; I tend to think that with so many of the undecided voters being young unmarried women, we have a good shot at getting more of them in the end than Romney does; I continue to think our field operation is out-performing Romney’s; and the great job that Obama is doing re disaster relief may help him in the end as well. If even 2 or 3 of those hunches turn out to be true, we could win the national popular vote by 4 points, and most of the swing states by at least that much; if all 4 of them are true, we could be looking at a final margin of 5 points.
When it comes to the Senate, the biggest question in my mind, the thing that could turn into a surprise, is if one party or another, for whatever mysterious set of reasons, ends up winning most of the closest races. Given that there are now 15 races considered by both parties to be competitive, a strong trend by either party in winning the close ones will be a big deal. One other thing to add here: if Obama does end up with a 4-5 point victory, that will almost certainly help some Dem Senate candidates win close races.
The biggest surprise of all according to Conventional Wisdom would be the Democrats winning the House. I am not going to predict that one — I am not that much of an optimist. The money that Rove and Co. are spending on House races makes that scenario very tough. But this scenario is not as impossible as the CW would have it. If my optimistic hunch about Obama turns out to be right and he is winning by 4 or 5, that will definitely give Dem House candidates in close races a boost. And a superior field operation for Obama in FL, NC, VA, NH, PA, OH, MI, MN, IA, CO, and NV could well bring several House seats home. In the end, Democratic House candidates will have to win over 60 percent of the closest races to pull this off, but that isn’t out of the question.
One final note that gives a Democratic surprise scenario a little more hope: we continue to win the basic argument in this race. Romney has had to move our way rhetorically, the tea partiers have been forced on their heels. On the issues and on values, we are winning this year’s debate.
Wouldn’t that be amazing if after all this talk of the closest election ever, Democrats ended up with a major trifecta sweep? Yeah, I know, I’m being more than a little optimistic here. But a boy can dream, can’t he? And I guarantee you, having lived through big surprise elections like 1980, 1994, 1998, 2000: stranger things have definitely happened.


Obama Among Best Presidents for the U.S. Economy

Despite the tenth of a percent uptick in the overall unemployment rate, the consensus among economic commentators is that Democrats should be encouraged by the full range of better-than-expected economic statistics that were released today.
For a longer-range historical perspective, however, check out Morgan House’s “The Best Presidents for the Economy” at The Motley Fool, which compares economic statistics reported for 19 presidents from Teddy Roosevelt thru Barack Obama. Among the findings, President Obama ranks:

4th of the 19 presidents in terms of “the inflation-adjusted, dividend-adjusted, performance of the S&P 500.”
1st in “average annual real corporate profit growth.”
11th in “average annual real GDP growth per capita.”
12th in “average annual change in the consumer price index.” (higher inflation under 11 of the 19 presidents)
9th in “change in unemployment rate during the presidency.”

Yes, there are unique historical circumstances that affect these rankings. But it’s clear that it’s quite a stretch to argue that the Obama administration has been bad for business in any comparative sense.