Trump-Voting Parts of US Recouping Pandemic Job Losses Faster Than Biden-Voting Areas: Study

Counties across the United States where the majority of residents voted for President Donald Trump in the 2020 election are recouping all their COVID-19 pandemic job losses at a faster rate than those that voted for President Joe Biden, according to an analysis by the Economic Innovation Group.

The analysis is based on local employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics through the first quarter of 2022.

It found that through the first quarter, counties that supported Trump had nearly fully regained all the jobs they lost when the COVID-19 pandemic led to a downturn at the start of 2020.

Specifically, it found that by the end Q1 2022, Trump-supporting counties were just 124,000 jobs short of where they stood prior to the pandemic in Q1 2020, marking an employment shortfall of about 0.3 percent.

In contrast, counties in which a majority of the residents voted for Biden began the year with an employment shortfall of 1.7 million jobs, or 1.8 percent of total pre-pandemic employment, according to the analysis.

Analysts noted that Biden counties lost nearly four times as many jobs in the first year of the pandemic than cities in Trump counties.

Furthermore, analysts noted that Biden states will likely only recover the jobs they lost to the pandemic in late 2022, whereas states that Trump won surpassed pre-pandemic employment levels back in January this year.

‘Predisposed to Be More Resilient’

Analysts said that Trump counties have made greater progress because they were “predisposed to be more resilient in the face of this particular shock—because of the very different economic and social natures of the competing political geographies,” while Biden-supporting areas had suffered from the continued weak recovery of business districts, particularly in light of an uptick in remote work.

Those areas include nearly all the country’s key business districts that simply “disappeared with the pandemic,” analysts said.

The report also showed that so-called purple states, those where Democrats

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