Planets Align to Predict Election Turmoil

Nov. 2, 2012 -- Citing national polls, local polls and battleground state polls, political pundits are fully equipped to predict who'll win the presidential election next week.

But there is another piece of analysis to consider: What do the stars say?

Turns out, it's not only political pundits who say the election is too close for comfort. The planets agree.

A survey on politicalastrologyblog.com, a non-partisan astrology blog dedicated to politics, shows 31 top astrologers' agreeing that President Obama's astrological chart favors his winning re-election, compared with 14 astrologists' concluding that Romney's chart shows he will win.

Three of the astrologers who looked at both men's charts have refused to predict a winner at all, calling the election "too close to call."

But one thing on which all the astrologists can agree is that the election is going to be a nail-biter, and we might not know the outcome for days, possibly weeks, after voting ends. Political analysts who've looked at polls of likely voters, swing states and early voting say the same thing.

But for astrologists, planet movements are most important, and on Election Day, Nov. 6, at around 6 p.m., something will happen in the universe that has never happened before in the history of U.S. elections. The planet Mercury will stop moving forward and begin moving backward. It's a process called "Mercury retrograde" that will last about three weeks. Astrologers predict it will wreak havoc on the 2012 election.

When astrologers Chris Brennan and Patrick Watson, who run the blog, wrote up their own 2012 election report in April, they too predicted that Obama would win re-election, but they included a warning about the effects of Mercury retrograde.

"Mercury is THE planet of politics and elections, given its association with things like communication, calculation, debates, controversies, oratory, etc.," Brennan and Watson wrote. "In some instances elections that occur during Mercury retrograde periods have problems surrounding these areas."

Although the 2012 election will be the first time a U.S. election has happened at the start of Mercury retrograde, there have been two other U.S. elections that have occurred during the period: Kennedy vs. Nixon in 1960, when Kennedy won by a lead of only 0.1 percent, and the Bush vs. Gore "hanging chad" election of 2000.

"If the Mercury retrograde is as bad as it was in 20008, then there's an important target period, about three weeks after Election Day, until we think that things will be resolved," Brennan told ABC News.

A panel of astrologists met in May at a conference and issued the prediction that Obama would win re-election, but also said there would be delays and irregularities in the electoral process because of Mercury retrograde and Romney's astrological chart.

None of the astrologers predicted the devastating effects of superstorm Sandy on the nation, and on the election. But Brennan says Sandy has actually helped explain some the uncertainty they predicted months ago.

"The weird thing for us is that we didn't understand earlier this year why it looked like there could be a delay of as much as three weeks before Romney, especially, felt that the election was over, that there was something left unfinished," Brennan said.

"We're still wondering if the hurricane won't play some major part of that because we had no idea that there might be a hurricane a week before the election when we made that statement earlier this year," he added. "But it seems like that is starting to play a part in it."