What credit does Trump deserve for growth in jobs?
In places such as Montgomery County in Texas and Pickens County in South Carolina, which voted for President Donald Trump by more than 45 percentage points in 2016, the job market surged during the first two years of his administration.
Questions remain, though, about how much of the improvement was his doing, and whether the pattern is in the process of reversing.
Data released Wednesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that average employment grew by 1.6 percent in 2018 in the 10 percent of places — 1,256 counties — that voted for Trump most strongly. Job growth did not rise as quickly in counties that supported him by a smaller margin and in counties that voted for Hillary Clinton.
Before Trump took office, employment growth in the counties that favored him by more than 45 percentage points was nearly zero. But almost one year into his presidency, job growth picked up in these places.
Although Trump has often credited himself for the job growth that has taken place in red states, the cause seems most related to deep shifts in the global economy that coincided with the start of his presidency.
Earlier reports hinted that this rebound in pro-Trump counties might have been a temporary blip, but a second year of even stronger employment growth followed the first one.
“I think there’s a real sense that there may be some forward motion in these places,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who published a similar analysis.
Muro says there’s little evidence that the growth in these counties is a direct result of Trump administration policies. If anything, he argues, some of its policies might be a drag — like the trade war with China, which has resulted in retaliatory tariffs with a disproportionate effect on the counties that voted for Trump.
Instead, what appears to have happened is that these places recovered from a little-noticed mini-recession that rocked key industries disproportionately located in strongly pro-Trump counties.
In 2015 and 2016, oil prices dropped; demand from emerging markets dried up; and investment slowed. This hurt sectors like energy and manufacturing, but few outside these industries noticed because nationwide unemployment was low and growth positive.
The downturn took a toll on these deep-red counties. Their growth was nearly ¾ of a percentage point less on average than for other counties.
But a few years of higher oil prices and improved global growth helped. The growth average in such counties moved slightly ahead of growth in the ones that voted for Clinton.
This highlights a problem for these deeply Trump counties: their reliance on volatile industries. Sectors such as manufacturing, energy and agriculture are more vulnerable to the vagaries of currency markets, global markets and economic policy, according to Jed Kolko, chief economist at Indeed and an occasional New York Times contributor. Blue places rely more on service-sector industries such as health, technology and finance, which are more resistant to such fluctuations. They also account for the majority of employment in America.
Kolko also cautions that this pattern of strong growth in Trump counties might not last much longer. He points to less fine-grained but more recent 2019 state-level employment figures from April showing that blue states are growing faster than red states.
Industry-level jobs data echo this change; employment in the goodsproducing industries (which include mining and manufacturing) has begun slowing in 2019. And experts say Trump’s new plan to increase tariffs with Mexico will worsen this trend.