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Palin, marco rubio and mitt romney. stakes may be higher in mississippi. polls close at 8:00 p.m. eastern. we have numbers. right now with 58.7% of resin kts reporting, thad cochran has a slight lead over chris mcdaniels. senator cochran has 58%. we are going to go, i think, let's go directly out. casey hunt, e.j.dion, steve schmidt with us tonight. let's go right to you, casey, on the numbers. what do we hear? >> at this point it is anybody's guess. this is a very, very, close race. all along. senator cochran has had a little bit of an edge. no one in the campaign is sure that will hold. they...

A lot of what is happening, is that the unemployment rate since about four years ago has dropped not because people are getting employed but because they are moving from unemployed to just jobless. >> the front page of the "wall street journal' has a headline, low pay clouds job growth. what is the real number we should be look at? >> the number that is most important right now and important in determining income growth and tax revenue and how many people are on welfare it's called the employment rate. it's the share of the working-age population with a job. right now that number is very low. ...

Is something simple called the employment rate. it is the share of working rate, share of the population with a job. right now that number is low, about 58.7%. and the problem with that, of course, is that when the recession started, that was thought to be about 63%. when the recession ended, it had fallen from 63 to 59.4%, but since then in the four years of recovery, that number has only gone down. it has actually declined over time. so for any sort of progress in recovery, that's the number that has to go up. have to have a bigger share of population with work, and that's not happening. >> ...

Important determining income growth and tax revenue and how many people are on welfare, it is something simple called the employment rate. it is the share of the working age population with a job. right now that number is low, about 58.7%. and the problem with that, of course, is that when the recession started, that was thought to be about 63%. when the recession ended, it had fallen all the way from 63% to 59.4%, but since then in the four years of recovery, that number has only gone down. it has actually declined over time. so for any sort of progress in recovery, that's the number that has...

People who are considered unemployed. i think a more reasonable number is 18 million people who should be considered unemployed. >> and that labor participation group left the labor force, which keeps the unemployment rate artificially low. >> that's right. that's six million difference there, and you put those back into the unemployment rate and you're talking about something nearly a throw percentage point higher than it is right now. this is a real disconnect. if you look at something simple like the employment ratio, which the numbers i actually perform what share of the population has a j...