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Ranchers.net

Currently, 69 percent of Americans disapprove of the way President Bush is doing his job. That is the highest disapproval rating since Gallup began polling 70 years ago -- higher than Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon during Watergate, or Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis.

Today, notes polling expert Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute, more Americans think the country is on the wrong track than at any time since the late 1970s -- which set the stage for the Republican resurgence of 1980, led by Ronald Reagan. The sentiment is even more negative now than it was in 1992, when the GOP lost the White House. Some 63 percent see the Iraq war as a mistake.

Bush's troubles have sent voters fleeing from his party. In 2004, 47 percent of Americans leaned toward the Democratic Party, with 44 percent leaning Republican -- a 3-point difference. Today, it's 51 to 38 in favor of the Democrats -- a gap of 13 percentage points.
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Richard Norton Smith, a historian who has run the presidential libraries of Republicans Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, is pessimistic about the party's prospects. He thinks the correct analogy is not 1988 but 1920 or 1952 -- when an unpopular war and an equally unpopular president spelled doom for the party in the White House. He thinks 2008 is shaping up not only as a narrow defeat for the GOP but a decisive "repudiation."
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The fallout is already apparent. In recent months, Republicans have lost two special elections to fill seats that had been GOP strongholds. Those shocks prompted former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to warn that come November, his party faces the prospect of "a real disaster."

The oddsmakers say the betting folks are putting their money on Obama right now....

Current Odds for who will be next President

Obama 8/11
McCain 11/8
Clinton 9 to 1
Gore 33 to 1
Paul 150 to 1
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