Florida still hasn’t called the race officially, but is supposed to sometime today (Saturday). Really, what an embarrassment for Florida election officials — for the 2nd time in 12 years.

But unless there’s a shoebox of uncounted votes from the Panhandle sitting undiscovered in a corner somewhere, Obama is going to win Florida by about .8 points, which means my electoral college prediction was right on the money. (I’ll need to see some more numbers to confirm, but it also looks like my rationales were correct.)

So with not quite but almost all the vote in, here’s where things stand:
Obama: 61,680,896
Romney: 58,482,875

The totals from 2008:
Obama: 69,492,376
McCain: 59,946,378

There’s obviously no single explanation for all these numbers, but here are some of the more obvious ones:

• The 2008 election provided voters with an historic chance to elect a black president. That might have boosted turnout among some racists, but it generally was a positive for Obama.
• In 2008, the economy was in a downward spiral and getting worse. The Bush administration seemed completely incapable of grasping what was going on — that did incalculable, irreversible damage to the Republicans on the ballot.
• Despite some occasionally odd moves (like picking Palin as VP), McCain had both war-hero levels of respect and real credibility with moderates. Romney had to move so far right during the primary and articulated such a weak message for moderates who would call themselves fiscal conservatives that he couldn’t ever successfully broaden his support far enough beyond the ABO — Anyone But Obama — crowd.
• The economy here in 2012 is getting better (to the consternation of many!), which might have caused some Americans to have no stake in the outcome.
• The relatively good showing for 3rd parties (especially Gary Johnson) at 1.6 percent and the surge of support for Ron Paul in the primaries suggest that an increasing number of Americans found neither party’s message compelling. I’m guessing that a lot of those Ron Paul supporters didn’t vote last Tuesday, but I’ll need to see some numbers on that — just a guess. One clue: third party candidates did best in states like Idaho, Wyoming, and even Utah. In 2008, other candidates received a total of 2.1 percent; in 2012, that number was 2.8 percent.
• Did Romney ever seal the deal with rural whites and cultural conservatives? They voted for him for sure — and heavily. But I’ll be curious to see the turnout numbers relative to 2008. In a poll a couple of months ago of the heavily Republican 12th district that Barrow ended up winning, only 53 percent of voters had lined up in support of Romney. (That’s almost exactly the support that Romney ended up with statewide.)
• Obama’s steep decline — almost 8 million votes — likely had to do with Obamacare, with the slow recovery, perhaps with some lessening of enthusiasm among the most liberal Americans, the lack of a true historical moment like 2008.
• As I’ve said before, the conviction of the Romney campaign and the right-wing punditocracy that they were winning almost certainly led to a weaker strategy in terms of motivating core supporters and appealing to moderates and independents.

By the way, of the states that Romney won, Georgia was the second closest. He took North Carolina by 2.2 percent. Georgia was next at 8.0 percent.

How many votes did Romney end up losing because of the relatively weak field of Republican Senate candidates who were generally to the right of the mainstream in their state? I suspect candidates like Murdouck and Akin hurt the national ticket, and even helped Democratic Senate candidates in other states.

“Of course, Obama has no chance of getting a second term in this economy,” my friend said definitively.

“And whoever gets elected in 2012 will be a one-term President too.”

Other friends — including some really well-educated ones — seemed to think the economy would come roaring back as soon as Obama took the oath of office. Given the nature of the financial crisis and the housing bust, those were just dreams.

I get a lot of responses to my City Talk columns and blog posts about economic trends (usually local ones in print pieces, broader ones here on the blog), and sometimes I’m viewed as overly optimistic. But several years ago I was seen as “Mr. Doom and Gloom” by many local readers for my many articles both chronicling and predicting housing market woes.

But I just try to go where the arithmetic leads. Things were really bad and getting worse when my friend and I had that memorable lunch four years ago. It looked like things might get catastrophically worse.

Now, four years later, the economy is still very weak but getting better — in some cases quite markedly. I’ve lately been chronicling incredibly positive signs in the sheer number of major investments in Savannah’s greater downtown area.

And, despite a terrible performance in the first debate and a surging campaign for Mitt Romney, Obama is still a slight favorite to be re-elected according to the statistical model of polling by Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.

The economy is certainly better right now than I thought it would be at this point in the recovery. Recoveries from financial crises are notoriously choppy and weak. Even if the financial system had not teetered on the verge of complete collapse and even if we didn’t have almost 900 banks still under some sort of FDIC formal action, the overbuilding during the boom years and the bursting of the housing bubble would have been a drag on the economy for many years.

The Obama administration has made some errors, in my opinion, including a few big ones. One huge one that created unreasonable expectations was the claim that the 2009 stimulus package would arrest the unemployment rate at 8 percent. That prediction was made before the President took office and before we knew the full depth of the GDP decline in the last quarter of 2008, but the statement was still laughable, even at the time. I’ll do an entire post about that before the election.

But on the whole, I’m betting that both the Obama administration and the Fed are going to get decent grades from history for their handling of the economy, especially given the entrenched opposition in Congress.

So are you better off than you were four years ago?

Let’s recall where we were four years ago.

The economy entered recession at the end of 2007 (see graph from Calculated Risk) primarily because of the housing bubble bursting — although “deflating” might be a better term given the stickiness of home prices and the poor understanding of the issues in many U.S. metros, including Savannah.

By fall 2008, the economy had been in clear decline for almost a year. In September, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, which in part led to the full-fledged financial crisis as chronicled in 2010 by Robert Samuelson at The Washington Post:

Consider what happened after Lehman:

— Credit tightened. Banks wouldn’t lend to each other, except at exorbitant interest rates. Rates on high-quality corporate bonds went from 7 percent in August to nearly 10 percent by October.

— Stocks tanked. After its historical high of more than 14,000 in October 2007, the Dow Jones industrial average was still trading around 11,400 before the bankruptcy. By October, it was about 8,400; by March 2009, 6,600.

— Consumer spending and business investment (on machinery, computers, buildings) — together about four-fifths of the economy — declined sharply. Already-depressed vehicle sales fell a third from August to February.

— Employment collapsed. Five million payroll jobs disappeared in the eight months following Lehman’s collapse. The unemployment rate went from 6.2 percent in September to 9.5 percent in June 2009.

In mentioning Lehman, I don’t mean to suggest that there was some easily preventable chain of cause and effect here. In the thorough timeline of the financial crisis created by the St. Louis Fed, there are 21 significant developments in just one month — October 2008.

By summer 2009, a combination of factors — the stimulus plan (more than a third of which was tax cuts, btw), the auto industry bailout, bold moves by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, and other stimulative measures — ended the economic freefall.

John McCain was promising a stimulus package too, but a smaller one. It’s also likely that his administration would have taken a more hands-off approach as major corporations verged on failure. Almost certainly, that approach would have led us to a far worse spot than where we are right now.

I don’t know how the collective memory of the 2007-2009 recession and the broader understanding of the difficulty of recovering from a financial crisis will impact November’s vote.

But I can virtually guarantee that — at best — we’ll still have the sense of shaking off a sluggish recovery when 2016 rolls around. That’s going to be the case no matter who wins. And it won’t be such a bad place to be, considering the alternatives.