What does Stanley Druckenmiller know about next year’s presidential election that the bookies don’t?

I contacted the legendary Wall Street tycoon, but he isn’t talking.

Earlier this week, Druckenmiller, who’s made billions in the hedge-fund game, said Donald Trump will have a very tough re-election battle.

“If you go county by county in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin,” Druckenmiller told The Economic Club of New York this week, “[Trump] is in deep, deep, deep trouble. And that was with the economy growing at 3%.”

Really?

The jobs numbers are up in all three states. Personal-incomes figures are up in all three states by even more. And the numbers of discouraged workers, and of former engineers bagging groceries, are way down.

If this is what “deep, deep, deep trouble” looks like, I’d love to see actual, er, growth.

The professional bookies are giving Trump at least a 50% chance of winning next year, and they’ve recently been moving their numbers up.

Meanwhile, Druckenmiller said he’d cashed out a lot of his stocks and loaded up on ultra-safe Treasuries because of all his worries.

Hmmm.

Improved job market

According to a MarketWatch analysis of U.S. government data, non-farm payrolls have risen 1.2% in Wisconsin since the election, 2.3% in Michigan, and 2.6% in Pennsylvania. Total personal incomes in the three have risen 8.9%, 8.4% and 9.3%. (Those numbers don’t take into account May’s report, released Friday.)

Oh, and the broadest count of the “unemployed” and the “under-employed” shows their numbers have plunged by about a quarter, or more, in all three states. The so-called “U6” doesn’t only count the official unemployed. It also includes people such as those who’ve given up looking for work because they’ve given up hope, and those who are working as part-time greeters or grocery baggers because they can’t find full-time jobs.

It was 8.0% in Wisconsin in the third quarter of 2016. It’s 5.7% now. The declines in the three other states are similar.

Democrats are almost certainly going to have to flip all three to recapture the White House next year.

Those are big moves in less than three years. Yes, they continue trends that began under Obama. But when it comes to the 2020 elections, so what?

There’s a lot of water yet to flow under the bridge before next year’s election. And votes can be swung by any number of things, from abortion, to war, to the incessant drumbeat of embarrassing presidential tweets.

But in most elections, famously, “it’s the economy, stupid.” And that’s still pointing Trump’s way.

Yes, the bond markets are turning cautious about economic growth. But the New York and Atlanta branches of the Federal Reserve both have gross domestic product on track to grow by about 1.5% this quarter in real, inflation-adjusted dollars. It’s not a boom, but it’s not a slump either.

Read:Value stocks are trading at the steepest discount in history

Stock market rally

And if there’s a recession on the horizon, nobody seems to have told the stock market.

Last month’s turmoil was trivial by Wall Street standards. Stocks have already recovered much of the lost ground. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY, +0.26% , which tracks the 500 biggest stocks, is back above its 200-day moving average, an important barometer.

To date, the benchmark S&P 500 Index SPX, +0.29% has now produced total returns of 39% since Trump’s election, and 32% since his inauguration.

Adjusted for inflation, those come to average annualized “real” returns of 11.4% and 9.5%. Those are way above par. The long-term average for the U.S. stock market — depending on whom you ask, and how they make their money — is somewhere in the ballpark of 6% a year.

Yes, professional bookies are offering even money on Trump getting re-elected. Frankly, at this point, the bet looks tempting.

Brett Arends is a MarketWatch columnist.