The world has turned upside down for the incumbent president. Sentiment has turned against him, and economic prosperity has collapsed. A newly published poll by Military Times reveals even the troops have lost faith in the current president, and favor Democrat Joe Biden (41% Biden v 37% Trump). Loss of support for an incumbent Republican by active-duty troops is practically unheard of.
Joe Biden is leading President Donald Trump in support among active-duty troops, according to a new poll.
In a Military Times poll released Monday, 41.3% of surveyed active-duty troops said they would vote for Biden, compared to 37.4% who said they would vote for Trump.
Nearly half of respondents said they had an unfavorable view of Trump, and 42% said they “strongly” disapprove of the president.
It looks as if Trump’s undermining of NATO, complete with a planned pullout of troops from Germany, and apparent US paralysis when Putin puts out bounties on the heads of soldiers fighting in Afghanistan have all together pulled the rug out from troops’ support for their erstwhile commander-in-chief.
Maybe soldiers in uniform are anxious too about the home-front economy’s freefall, on the heels of the pandemic of coronavirus.
Unemployment has jumped now to double-digits: 10.2% of the civilian workforce in July were counted as being unemployed (the latest month of data reported so far, ahead of the next report due Friday morning, Sept 4).
This follows what had been a steady falloff of unemployment before April, which had persisted for 9 years, since 2010, until April.
Breakdown of unemployment, by race, shown below: Black unemployment has jumped, and eased in part, to an agonizing 14.6% during July. Latino unemployment reached 12.9% in July. For whites, unemployment hovered at a punishing 9.2% in July.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, via FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis website)
Here’s the inverted view of jobs. Instead of the unemployment rate, the chart below shows JOBS gained/lost each quarter (compared to year ago). The counts are thousands (000s) of jobs. So the figure -16,893 for 2nd quarter translates to nearly 17 million for that quarter.
Nonfarm payroll jobs gained/lost (in thousands [000s]), compared to year ago.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, via FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis website)
The chart above covers up to the second quarter, to June. The monthly numbers to July would show the economy is still down more than 12 million jobs. [At the worst point so far, 22 million jobs had been lost, and 9 million of those were hired back.]
It’s not well recognized, but — even before the coronavirus — job growth was slower under Trump-Pence than the previous 3 years under Obama-Biden.
As a brief digression from the labor-market economy, it helps to look at the very long-term buoyancy of the stock market, shown in the S&P 500 index.
Graphic location: macrotrends.net . At the macrotrends.net chart link, hover over any month to see the comparative gain in the stock index.
Though Trump tries to send a siren warning that the stock market “(and your 401K !)” will tumble and crash if Biden is elected, the gains under Obama-Biden show a different story. The great gains in the stock market indices under Trump are achieved on the shoulders of impressive gains during the Obama-Biden years, when gains in the market were nearly doubled, from 2008.
Forbes magazine checks the record of stock returns under multiple presidents, and finds Democrats “dominating”. (Record through July, not including recent gains of August 2020.)
Forbes, July 23, 2020 “We Looked At How The Stock Market Performed Under Every U.S. President Since Truman — And The Results Will Surprise You”
Back to the summation of the job market, since most of us can’t eat our 401K plans, in real time.
Trump wants you to believe Biden will be the “destroyer of American jobs”, and unemployment would jump.
Here’s the unemployment rate (%), PRE-Coronavirus, for the entire civilian workforce.
Data from Bureau of Labor Statistics. Article source for graphic: markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/9-charts-comparing-trump-economy-to-obama-bush-administrations-2019-9-1028833119 JAN 21, 2020
That was then.
This is now. See chart below for unemployment rate (%), for African Americans.
Unemployment for African-Americans during the Obama years was sliced from double-digits to 8% at the end of 2016, as marked. It continued to fall, another 2 points, after Trump became president, to 5.9% at the end of 2019. And now has jumped to 14.6% in JULY of this year.
[Note — for additional charts, see demomentum.com
showing economic trends during the time from Obama-Biden through to Trump-Pence. The demomentum site was created and updated before the coronavirus catatrophophe, so it doesn’t reveal the recent jobs debacle.]
Trump’s economic boasts, and his denigration of his predecessor, are a great big con.
Trump likes to complain, he “inherited a mess.”
No. But he has created a mess, on his watch. And it won’t be easily undone.
