Walker has become fond of highlighting the 150,000 jobs lost in Wisconsin under his predecessor, Jim Doyle.
What Walker is less fond of highlighting is that despite this, Doyle's Wisconsin still did better on the job front than the nation as a whole during the Great Recession. Despite the job losses being horrific, Wisconsin stayed ahead of the national curve until such time as a certain Scott Walker decided that he had some great ideas about how the state economy should be run:
All charts created by RandomNonviolence. Sources (listed on the image) are on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website; the National series and Wisconsin series for the total nonfarm payroll number from the Current Employment Survey.
The long-awaited jobs recovery finally began in early 2010 both in the nation and in Wisconsin. Through 2010 Wisconsin matched the national recovery very closely until Walker's economic leadership had a chance to make an impact. An impact that we could well have done without:
That this is some regional downturn in 2011-12 is not an available excuse:
I'm obviously driven by data: it's a large part of how I myself make sense of the world. We can use charts like these to show one aspect of Scott Walker's comprehensive failure as a Governor, but it behooves us to remember that people are not numbers. That the 66,000 missing jobs represent a real vacuum in Wisconsin that affects real people in painfully real ways. That avoidable human suffering has been inflicted upon our state.
If only Walker's economic leadership were as average as Doyle's.
Daily Kos user madhaus has very helpfully put together an ActBlue page with all the Democratic candidates' campaigns on it plus some of the organizations that are working on the ground here.