WILLIAM STICKEVERS

Revised (6 of 21) Electoral Map Projection of the 2012 presidential election, based on mundane political contest horary: “Obama vs. GOP Nominee: Who will win X – battleground state?” With 270 electoral votes needed to win, the campaign will be fought in the battleground states of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin — a total of 151 electoral votes up for grabs. Based on the latest forecast, the presumptive GOP Nominee Mitt Romney has pulled ahead of the President by an additional 9 electoral votes with Colorado going from Blue to Red.

Since the May 20th Solar Eclipse, which made a direct hit to the Obama’s natal Moon, the President’s re-election campaign has been stumbling through the beginning of the summer phase of his national campaign. The President’s administration has been in a state of overwhelm with numerous setbacks, challenges, and crisis that is beyond his control. For example job growth has stalled, the Democrats lost in Wisconsin, the attorney general is facing a contempt-of-Congress citation, talks with Pakistan have broken down, Bill Clinton is contradicting Obama, Mitt Romney is outraising him, Democrats and Republicans alike are complaining about a “cascade” of national-security leaks from his administration, and now the President is on record as saying that the “private sector is doing fine.”  Could it get any worse?

The president who started off his 2008 campaign with such dazzle with a message of “hope and change”, now seems incapable of stimulating either the economy or the voters.  Now that there are warning signs everywhere that a new global recession is imminent and that the U.S. economy is the epicenter of the world economy most political experts believe that the general election will  essentially be a referendum on Obama’s stewardship of the economy. Many of the the divisive partisan issues and political rhetoric that often become the point of focus in Presidential campaigns of the past, will likely be secondary in voters minds come November.

Obama is still favored by most political pundits to win re-election and remains 0.8%+ ahead of Mitt Romney, his Republican challenger, according to a RealClearPolitics aggregate of national polls. However Mr Romney’s campaign is growing in strength throughout all the key battleground states and Obama’s re-election odds have wavered, with many polls putting the president within the margin of error for a win this November. But for Obama and Romney supporters, the best insight may be how the markets are performing come fall.

Below is a a chart we’ve seen many times before (updated through Friday’s close): Obama’s re-election odds (as calculated by InTrade) against the S&P 500.

The two are somewhat correlated — showing an R-squared of 0.62 — and stock market historian Sam Stovall says that equities predict the winner of the presidential ballot with 88 percent accuracy.