Courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) here are the unemployment rates for the “swing states”:
| States | Unemployment Rate |
| Arizona | 4.2 |
| Georgia | 3.4 |
| Michigan | 4.1 |
| Pennsylvania | 3.4 |
| Wisconsin | 3.2 |
All of those are lower than they were in January 2021 but higher than they were in December 2019.
Update
The CPI by state over the period isn’t readily available but here’s a graph of the historic CPI for the Midwest Region:
And here’s a graph of the change in real household income for each of the “swing states”:
Interesting. You want to compare UE with 2019 but inflation starting with 2019. There was a large increase in median income in 2020 due to covid.
Steve
Thank you for this.
One of my soapboxes lately is the focus on national averaged statistics and not the swing states. It looks like pretty much every indicator is below the national average.
BTW, I believe Nevada is also considered a swing state for 2024.
Steve,
There is a slider at the bottom to change the starting date. Seeing 2019, I don’t think it changes much. Every state is down except for Georgia.
One major caveat is that the FRED chart only goes 1/1/2022 for median income. FRED doesn’t have newer numbers for some reason, so we’re missing almost 2 years of data.
I did my best to compare apples with apples, using the least controversial sources I could identify.
I agree – I didn’t mean that as a criticism of you. It’s just strange they don’t have data through 1/1/2023. I did a cursory check and didn’t find an easy alternative source beyond manually collating monthly reports.