Over at Jake’s Eeconomic TA Funhouse, Jake has a great post outlining just how much of a failure Gov. Scott Walker has been at creating jobs.
With the June Wisconsin jobs report looming for release today, I wondered if that was playing a role in Scott Walker’s sudden desire to deflect and distract the media with lame anti-Mary Burke ads that are now being called false by Trek’s president, and constant (taxpayer-funded) trips to campaign contributors to announce “future expansions.” And it turns out I was right to be suspicious.
Turns out that the state lost 1,200 private sector jobs in June, and May was revised to show an extra 500 jobs lost in that month. This now means Wisconsin has lost private sector jobs in 4 of the 6 months of 2014- a time period that the US as a whole GAINED 1.33 MILLION private sector jobs. The only reason Wisconsin’s unemployment stayed even at 5.7% was because 7,400 people dropped out of the workforce, and now Wisconsin is only 0.4% below the US rate of 6.1% (it was 1.4% below when Walker took office in January 2011).
With the bad June report coming while the rest of the country was thriving (263,000 private sector jobs added, and 288,000 overall), the Walker jobs gap has jumped quite a bit higher. Wisconsin is now nearly 66,000 private sector jobs below what we’d have if we’d kept up with the US pace, and 56,000 jobs in the hole overall.
As Jake went on to note in his post, it’s worth noting Gov. Walker’s 2014 job failure has come despite the fact that two rounds of income tax cuts have taken effect.
At this point I don’t think Walker can blame Doyle and the average voter probably has no recollection of him being governor at this point. Can Walker tie the bad economy to Obama? It just depends on how many people know the economy is better nationally. The economy is just bad for the people who live in Wisconsin though. Not only is their a higher percentage of jobs in neighboring states, but they pay significantly more than jobs in Wisconsin at the same time.
Never underestimate the insularity of the average Wisconsin voter. This message about Wisconsin falling behind while the nation surges ahead must be front and center everywhere.