Presidents Usually Have Lousy Second Terms, They Also Don't Win With Unemployment This High
President Obama enters his second term
It's bound to come up that while incumbents have an advantage on election day, second terms are awful. George W. Bush's second term will come up (though his third one was better!), Bill Clinton's impeachment, Iran-Contra, Nixon's resignation, and Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam collapse. That sums up a half century of second term presidents. Dwight Eisenhower's second term was okay. It started 56 years ago, and he won re-election with unemployment at 3 percent. In the last hundred years, only Obama and Franklin Roosevelt have won with the unemployment rate above 7.2 percent; FDR had a good enough second term to win two more elections (and isn't that what matters?) Roosevelt, of course, presided over/aggravated the Great Depression.
Meanwhile, the stock market took a dive today.