Unemployment drops in key swing states

10/19/2012 5:37pm by 1,029

As HuffPost Hill put it, the economy has a well-known liberal bias.

CNNMoney:

Unemployment declined in 41 states in September, seven of which are key battlegrounds in the election. But falling unemployment rates don’t necessarily point to improvement.

Jobs via Shutterstock

Swing states Wisconsin, Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina also had declining unemployment rates in September, while the unemployment rate remain unchanged in the battleground states of Virginia and New Hampshire.

(As Chris reported earlier, if you listen to the godfather of the Tea Party, CNBC’s ranter Santelli, the improving unemployment rate is all one big liberal conspiracy.)

Latino unemployment numbers, however, are lagging, as are minority numbers overall.

In the three battleground states with the highest shares of Latino voters, the unemployment rate is higher than the national average in September. Nevada has a whopping 11.8 percent unemployment rate, Florida’s is 8.7 percent, and Colorado’s is 8.0 percent, just a tick above the national 7.8 percent rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Two other states where Latino voters could also play an influential role present a mixed bag. Virginia has a 5.9 percent unemployment rate, well below the national rate, while North Carolina’s is at 9.6 percent.

Fortunately, Latinos get the fact that George Bush caused this crisis, and Mitt Romney certainly doesn’t plan on doing squat for Latinos, who are quite clearly among Romney’s 47% category.

Nationally, Latinos have consistently named President George W. Bush and Congress as more culpable for the state of the economy than President Obama, according to Latino Decisions polling released earlier this month.

In Latino Decisions battleground state polling, 51 percent said they trust Obama to make the right decisions to improve the U.S. economy, while just 27 percent named Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, with 15 percent saying neither.

Having said that, HuffPo reported a few weeks ago that black and Latino unemployment, while higher, is decreasing faster than the national rate.

The nation’s Latino and black unemployment rates — both so critically elevated since the recession began that they have together kept the nation’s overall unemployment rate far above a level most economists consider healthy — also declined. In fact, Latino and black unemployment fell at a sharper clip than did that of white workers and the total workforce nearly reaching multi-year lows.

In September, 9.4 percent of Latino workers, 2.3 million men and women, remained jobless. That’s down from the 10.1 percent or 2.45 million workers who were unable to find jobs the month before. The September jobs report brought Latino unemployment near a level unseen since 2008.

Black workers saw even bigger jobs gains. In September, 13.4 percent of black workers, or 2.44 million people, remained out of work. That’s an improvement over the 14.5 percent of black workers, or 2.68 million black men and women who sought work in August but were unable to find it. September job gains pushed black unemployment down, quite close, to a level unseen since 2009.

Print FriendlyPrint
Tags: , , , , , ,


@aravosis | Facebook | Google+. Editor of AMERICAblog, joint JD/MSFS from Georgetown, worked in the US Senate, World Bank, Children's Defense Fund, and as a stringer for the Economist. A frequent TV pundit, he has been on The O'Reilly Factor, Hardball, World News Tonight, Nightline & Reliable Sources. Full bio and .

Share This Post
© 2013 AMERICAblog. All rights reserved. · Entries RSS