Obama Wins Reelection With Highest Unemployment Rate Of Any President Since FDR

What Obama And FDR Have In Common

What do Franklin Roosevelt and President Barack Obama have in common? Well, besides both attending Columbia and Harvard universities, they're two presidents who've been reelected with some of the highest unemployment rates in history.

Following his election victory Tuesday night, Obama became the president with the highest unemployment rate to win a second term since FDR, Bloomberg reports. Obama is also the only president since World War II -- besides Ronald Reagan -- to win re-election with the jobless rate above 6 percent. The U.S. economy added 171,000 jobs in October as the unemployment rate rose to 7.9 percent.

When Roosevelt was re-elected to his second term in 1936, America was in the throes of The Great Depression. The jobless rate was in the double digits during most of that period.

Despite the landmark victory in the face of so many jobless, an Obama loss would also have come as somewhat of a surprise given the consistent -- albeit slow -- rate of job growth under his administration. As The New York Times' Nate Silver points out, Obama's average monthly job growth of 157,000 jobs per month this year, according to Businessweek, surpasses the benchmark of about 150,000 per month that generally portends an incumbent presidential victory.

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