(Bloomberg) -- Campaigns and pundits have spent months obsessing over polls and other data that offer clues as to how people in the seven states most likely to decide the 2024 US presidential election will vote. It’s the economics in each of those battlegrounds that may matter most.
As a whole, the US economy has staged a remarkable — albeit inflation-tainted — recovery from the 2020 recession brought on by the Covid pandemic. Data released in the past week pointed to continuing strong growth even if temporary factors like hurricanes and strikes have hit the labor market.
The picture in the battleground economy of the seven swing states, which represents a combined 61 million people and a $4.4 trillion GDP equivalent to Germany’s, is more mixed.
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Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina have seen rapid growth fueled by investments and people moving in. Meanwhile, in the legacy industrial states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, growth has been more muted and uneven, with some counties battling population declines. In Nevada, the shadow of the pandemic and its hit to the tourism industry still hangs heavily over this year’s election.
Across the seven battlegrounds, voters polled for the Bloomberg/Morning Consult swing states poll have been consistent in listing the economy as their top priority.
President Donald Trump has led as the candidate voters trust most with the economy for most of this year across multiple polls. But Vice President Kamala Harris has closed the gap since taking over as the Democratic candidate in July, particularly when you examine specific issues. More swing-state voters, for example, trust Harris to bring down housing costs if she is elected.
Below is a look at some of the key characteristics of the battleground economies.
Many of them are outperforming the rest of the US, with six of the seven swing states registering faster inflation-adjusted growth in the second quarter of this year, according to official data released in late September.
Census data shows America’s post-2020 population growth is driven by increasing diversity, and this is one reason why Trump is trying to make inroads among Asian, Black and Hispanic voters even as he rails against immigration. Between April 2020 and July 2023, the nation’s White population declined by 2.1 million, even as the overall population rose by 3.4 million.
The Hispanic population contributed the most to these gains. White population declines were particularly large in the Blue Wall states. From 2022 to 2023, the number of White residents fell by 194,000, 91,000 and 35,000 in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin respectively.
Population changes are also linked to the uneven recovery from the 2020 pandemic seen in the seven states on which presidential campaigns have focused this year. There’s been stark disparities within states as well.
In Pennsylvania, the recovery has been fastest in big metro areas like Philadelphia and its suburbs. But 40% of the state’s population lives in counties that, according to the latest official data available, had not recovered to their pre-pandemic GDP by the end of 2022. The slow recovery in those counties has often been accompanied by population declines, a trend seen in areas of other industrial swing states Michigan and Wisconsin. Many of those counties are ones that Trump carried in the 2020 election and is likely to win again this year.
A few of the seven swing states have also been facing more economic misery than the rest of the US.
The misery index helps determine how the average citizen is doing economically by combining the unemployment rate with the annual inflation rate. The misery indexes in Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania are among the highest in the country.
Offsetting some of those high misery rates, the average worker in those three states has seen relatively robust income gains.
The smallest gains were seen in Georgia and Arizona, according to data on almost 10 million employees compiled by ADP.
Job growth is booming in the swing states of Arizona and Nevada. In those states, employment is up by more than 10% over the last five years, but the unemployment rate in Nevada is also among the highest in the country. That’s because a rising unemployment rate doesn’t always mean people are getting fired — the rate can also rise because the population and labor force are increasing faster than the local economy can create jobs.
In places like Nevada, that has consequences. About 73% of likely voters in that state said the economy is going in the wrong direction, more than the overall swing-state average of 68% in a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll conducted between Oct. 16 and Oct. 20.
Nevada isn’t the only swing state with an unemployment rate higher than the national average. In Michigan the jobless rate was 4.5% in September, compared with 4.1% nationally.
The surging cost of buying a home has been top of mind for many voters this year as part of a broader anxiety over a repricing of the American Dream that has seen key middle-class milestones move further out of reach for many in the US.
Renting has also become more expensive. Since late 2019, renters in North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona have faced significantly higher rental-cost burdens.
Lots of issues can animate voters as they head to the polls. For many, the economy may not be the deciding factor in an election in which reproductive rights, border security and immigration, foreign policy and the broader state of American democracy have also drawn attention.
But for those swing-state voters for whom the economy does drive their decisions, the context that matters most may well be local rather than national.
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--With assistance from Christopher Cannon and Allan James Vestal.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.