Unemployment By State and Political Party

Unemployment rates were lower in June in 6 states and stable in 44 states and the District of Columbia, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Three states had jobless rate decreases from a year earlier and 47 states and the District had little or no change.

Vermont had the lowest unemployment rate in June, 2.1 percent. The rates in Alabama (3.5 percent), Arkansas (3.5 percent), New Jersey (3.5 percent), and Texas (3.4 percent) set new series lows. (All state series begin in 1976.) Alaska and Puerto Rico had the highest jobless rates, at 6.4 and 8.4 percent respectively. In total, 13 states had unemployment rates lower than the U.S. figure of 3.7 percent, 9 states and the District of Columbia had higher rates, and 28 states had rates that were not appreciably different from that of the nation.

Table of U.S. State Political Party statistics as of January 2019

I’ve sorted the following table by political party. If we look at it this way, we can see that the average unemployment of the strictly Democrat states is 3.85%, the strictly Republican states are 3.52%, and the mixed states are 3.55%. When we looked at unemployment by state and political party back in July 2017 we found that Democrat states were at 4.4%, Republican states were at 3.8% and mixed states were at 4.2%. But this was based strictly on 2016 Presidential Election Results. In this table, we also take into account governor, state senate and state house political affiliation.

In that article, we also covered some of the terrible things going on in Alaska that makes it an exception to the rule.

Interestingly in this year’s data, we can see that both Arizona and New Mexico have higher than average unemployment rates at 4.9% and one is Democrat and the other Republican. So why is that? Could it be because of all of the illegal immigrants entering those states?