A key figure in 2010 election: US unemployment rate

The key number in next year's US congressional election may be the unemployment rate, which last month hit a 26-year high of 9.8%.

The figure helps explain why creating jobs is a top priority in the Democratic-led Congress where lawmakers know their own jobs are at stake if they fail to deliver.

Democrats will get an early whiff of whether they are being blamed for the economy on Tuesday, when voters go to the polls to elect governors of New Jersey and Virginia and a congressman in a conservative-leaning New York district bordering Canada.

In next year's election, the Democrats face a head wind. The party in power typically loses seats in the election after a new president—in this case Barack Obama—takes office.

The wind could become a storm if the ranks of the unemployed swell. The rate is widely forecast to top 10% before going down.

Analysts say a double-digit jobless rate on election day in November 2010 could help cost Democrats upward of two dozen seats in the House of Representatives, which they now hold, 256-177, with two vacancies. It could also cost them in the Senate, which they control, 60-40.

"The election is going to be about three issues: Jobs. Jobs. Jobs," said Ethan Siegal of The Washington Exchange, a private firm that tracks Congress and the White House for institutional investors.

Signaling the end to the deepest recession since the 1930s Great Depression, the government said last week the US economy grew at a robust 3.5% pace in the third quarter.

Democrats credit the recovery, in part, to the $787 bn economic stimulus package that was passed this year over Republican objections.

But the job market, often a lagging indicator, is taking far longer to show improvement. How long it lags could be pivotal. The White House is bracing for unemployment to stay high through the first half of next year.

The first sign of how the economy fared in the fourth quarter comes on Friday, when October's unemployment figures are released.