States that helped Trump win see biggest job losses

Battleground states that handed Donald Trump the presidency four years ago are seeing higher-than-average layoffs amid an economic downturn wreaking havoc across the country — a dynamic that could hold major implications for November’s election.

Job losses are piling up in places like Michigan, where more than one in four workers applied for unemployment benefits in the past five weeks, according to a POLITICO analysis of Labor Department data. In Pennsylvania, another key Rust Belt state that voted for Trump in 2016, nearly one-fourth of the workforce has filed an unemployment claim since mid-March. Ohio is seeing more than 17 percent of workers filing jobless claims, outpacing the national average of 16.1 percent, as is Minnesota, a state Trump narrowly lost.

One of the only major battlegrounds seeing a lower claims rate than the national average is Wisconsin, according to the analysis, which compared claims filed to the number of employees on states’ non-farm payrolls in February. But with more than one in eight workers filing for benefits there, it’s still a dramatic rise for a state that for years boasted an unemployment rate of 3.5 percent or lower, trending below the national average.

The numbers are likely to continue rising for weeks, as states work through a backlog of applications and race to dole out benefits to gig workers and others who are newly eligible for aid. They’ll remain elevated as long as restaurants, retail stores and other non-essential businesses remain shuttered. And even once some areas of the country begin to reopen, it could be months or years before Americans are back to work at the same levels as before — undercutting Trump’s plans to hang his re-election bid on leading the economy to a robust recovery.



https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/23/states-that-helped-trump-win-see-biggest-job-losses-204072