President Barack Obama cannot escape one giant vulnerability as he bids to keep his job: There are millions of voters who still don’t have one.

Suddenly, the snapshot of the American economy is depressing again.

Job creation is down. So is consumer confidence. And homes sales, auto sales, construction spending, manufacturing expansion.

The brutal month of May was a reminder of the economy’s fragility and the risks for an incumbent president.

Nothing that Obama oversees, not even a success as dramatic as finding and killing Osama bin Laden, will matter as much as his handling of the economy. It is the dominant driver of voter behaviour. People hold their president accountable if they can’t find work in the richest country in the world.

The weakening recovery is testing the entire foundation of Obama’s optimistic economic message, that the nation is getting stronger all the time. As much as the White House says it never dwells on any single jobs report, the stakes get higher by the month.

A finally forming field of Republican presidential competitors is manoeuvring into the space for the public’s attention with this message: Obama has failed.

Election Day 2012 is 17 months away, and Obama’s campaign knows incremental job growth won’t do. The unemployment rate is 9.1%. If it stays anywhere near there, Obama will face re-election with a higher jobless rate than any other post-war president.

In his favour, Obama still has the loudest voice to sell his message that the longer term trends, including job growth every month, are good.

Nearly halfway through a year dominated by foreign events mostly outside his control, he plans to build his next few months around economic events.

So what comes next will be a summer when both sides select the economic facts that best suit their case. It will play against a backdrop of trying to cut a massive deficit while letting the nation borrow more so it doesn’t default.

As Obama pushes his economic agenda, his re-election chances bank on more than job growth. They also depend on how well he can remind people that he inherited a recession and that compared with the early days of 2009, the country is in a better place.

Is progress enough to convince people that he deserves a second term?

If so, he can’t afford many setbacks like the new jobs report. Employers in May added just 54,000 jobs, the fewest in eight months. Almost 14 million people are jobless. Analysts suggested the economy could improve this year, but the recovery could be weak for months.

Even 8% unemployment, a goal once promoted by the administration, is hard to see now.

Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush all faced unemployment rates higher than 7.5% in the final months of their re-election campaigns. Reagan won, and an important factor for him was that the jobless rate was declining at the time. Carter and Bush lost.