With brawls breaking out at campaign rallies, voter anger is a major and surprising factor in this year’s presidential campaign.
Republican Donald Trump, widely written off when he declared his candidacy last summer, has become his party’s front-runner by harnessing the rage of older, less-educated Americans who feel they’re falling hopelessly behind. Democrat Bernie Sanders, once considered a pipsqueak next to Hillary Clinton, now rouses multitudes with his rants against crony capitalism. There’s a common theme: Even though unemployment is low and employers are creating more than 200,000 new jobs per month, a large part of America isn’t participating in the recovery and finds prosperity further and further out of reach.
The surprising role of free trade as a campaign bogeyman reveals the problem: Many Americans feel too many good jobs have migrated overseas, with nothing coming back in return. Some economists, typically proponents of free trade, are beginning to question the merits of offshoring jobs to lower-cost countries like China and Mexico. Trade is supposed to make economies more efficient and raise living standards for most people, but for a decade or more the expected results haven’t been materializing.
With trade and prosperity prominent in the campaign, Yahoo Finance analyzed economic data for each state during the last 10 years to determine which states seem to be feeling the most pain from globalization and the movement of jobs overseas. For each state, we calculated the change in manufacturing employment, total employment and income during the last 10 years. Then we ranked the states on their overall economic performance. (Full methodology is at the end of this story.) These 10 states are hurting the most:
[Click here to see how every state ranks.]
Not all of those are key early primary states where candidates are likely to hold rallies, which is why New Mexico, Rhode Island and Delaware haven’t been in the angry-voter headlines. But of the three angry states that have held Republican primaries—Alabama, Nevada and Mississippi—Trump has won all three. Hillary Clinton won the three Democratic primaries, although Bernie Sanders was a close second in Nevada. And Sanders spent little time in Alabama or Mississippi, which are Clinton strongholds.
Sanders did notch a surprise win in Michigan, which is the 11th angriest state. Total employment in Michigan has fallen by 1.7% during the last 10 years, while manufacturing employment has fallen by 9.8%. Incomes are up by 7.8%, but inflation over the same period of time has been 13.8%. So the typical Michigander is falling behind. Not surprisingly, Trump won there as well.