Swing states post job gains

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ^ | Oct. 22, 2004 | RICK ROMELL

[mafree]

With the presidential campaign heading into its final stretch, Wisconsin continues to pick up jobs more rapidly than most key battleground states.

Employment figures released this week by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics paint a complex picture of the swing states, showing job growth since December but, in most cases, job losses over the course of the Bush presidency.

That's true of Wisconsin, too, but the state has fared better than most of its tossup counterparts.

Among 11 intensely contested swing states, only rapidly growing Nevada has added jobs at a faster rate this year than Wisconsin. And the number of new jobs here - 59,200 - trailed only Pennsylvania and Florida, states with much larger populations.

"Wisconsin has had a pretty good year," said Tim Adams, policy director for the Bush campaign. "There are a few states in the union that have had better, but as far as the battleground states are concerned, Wisconsin, from our perspective, has had a very solid year."

The perspective from Sen. John Kerry's campaign, not surprisingly, is quite different. There, a spokesman emphasized the job losses in the state's manufacturing sector since Bush took office.

"Wisconsin has fared better than other states," said Justin Hamilton, the campaign's Milwaukee spokesman, "but when you have 65,000 manufacturing jobs lost, you know that you have a long way to go to get where you need to be."

Bureau of Labor Statistics data actually show a loss of 68,000 manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin since January 2001. The state has gained 14,000 factory jobs since December - first among the battleground states analyzed.

Most of those states have lost jobs overall since Bush took office, with the losses particularly acute in Ohio. But Florida, New Mexico and Nevada have shown net gains - in Nevada's case, an increase of 9%.

What matters to voters when they consider the economy, however, is another question. Some experts on voting behavior, in fact, said economic issues are being trumped by Iraq and terrorism in this election.

Voters, when asked, tend to say the economy is their leading concern, "but I'm not convinced that's because it really is," said Thomas M. Holbrook, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The "basic judgment" will come on the war on terror, which might favor Bush, and the Iraq war, which could favor Kerry, he said.

John Dinan, an associate professor of political science at Wake Forest University, said much of the same thing.

He pointed to the 2000 election, when analysts using economic models predicted an easy victory for Democratic candidate Al Gore. Clearly, Dinan said, other factors were at play. And this year, with concerns such as terrorism hanging over the country, the influence of non-economic factors should be even greater.

Thomas E. Patterson, a political scientist at Harvard University, said surveys there had shown the economy and Iraq to be of equal importance to voters. But the people who view Iraq as the key issue feel it more intensely, he said.

"I think Iraq has really been what's kind of made people perk up and say this is a big one," Patterson said.

As Kerry emphasizes what has happened to the economy since Bush took office, and Bush points to the stronger performance this year, Holbrook said economic conditions don't clearly favor one candidate or the other. He said voters weighing the economy in their decisions were more likely to focus on the last year or so. But Patterson said the recent gains might be muted in voters' eyes by the earlier record.

"When you're coming up from the bottom and you add 10,000 jobs in a big state, it's kind of hard to feel that," he said.

[MeekOneGOP]

Let's see Lurch spin this into a "doom and gloom" story

He'll say Bush is cooking the books - he never misses a chance to call Bush a LIAR!

Jean Keri introduces his Plan for America ...