title:  May Jobs Report And Unemployment Rate Bleak – Guess Who’s To Blame? (Hint: It’s Not Obama)
text: After a shaky jobs report in April, May had a downright terrible showing, on which Republicans have already pounced as evidence of supposedly  failed  Democratic policy. They re busy going after both Obama and Hillary Clinton for this dismal report as hard as they can. In fact, GOP chairman Reince Priebus tweeted:Devastating jobs report showing weakest hiring in 5 yrs is sign we need to move away from failed Obama policies Clinton is promising to keep  Reince Priebus (@Reince) June 3, 2016Donald Trump, never one to pass up an opportunity to pretend he knows everything, pounced, too, tweeting: Terrible jobs report just reported. Only 38,000 jobs added. Bombshell!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 3, 2016President Obama has been working hard to polish his image on the economy, and this report could very easily tarnish and dent it. That s especially true with the paradox of a falling unemployment rate paired with an abysmal jobs report. The falling unemployment rate is almost entirely due to more than 450,000 people dropping out of the labor force in May. That makes it a misleading statistic, and therefore, a black eye for Obama. Right?Wrong. There s evidence suggesting that someone else could be to blame for this, like Donald Trump and his supporters.Uneducated white people a.k.a the average Trump voter had ten times the impact on the unemployment rate that they should have, given the size of their demographic compared to the overall population. It s true that employment in this demographic has been destroyed by globalization and automation, which is why they support Trump. They like his protectionist mentality and his business credentials (if, indeed, they can be called that).While yes, exit polls during certain states  primaries showed that Trump s voters may actually be better off economically than their Democratic counterparts, some of that may be due to the fact that Republican voters tend to be wealthier than Democratic voters. They also tend to turn out for primaries far more than Democratic voters.Other analyses have found that Trump s main demographic is, in fact, the poor, white, uneducated, working-class male, despite what exit polls from state primaries said. Trump solidified his hold on the GOP s nomination in May, and his job-creation rhetoric resonates heavily with this group. Could his promises of bringing jobs back be making people drop out of the labor force?The jobs report showed serious declines in both construction and manufacturing, which are two of the main industries in which these people tend to work. Trump keeps promising he ll bring their jobs back from overseas, and he ll spur all kinds of economic activity here, and these voters eat it up like candy.Dropping out of the labor force and voting Republican implies that these voters think others should just pick themselves up by their bootstraps (finish high school, get a degree, learn a new trade, etc.) but they themselves shouldn t have to. They can sit and wait until Trump is elected, and then their jobs will come flowing back, they ll be working again, and all will be right with the world.There s no way to know for sure whether this is true right now, but Trump s outsized influence over these people could easily have convinced them to drop out of the labor force and just wait for him to get elected and solve their employment woes for them.Featured image by Clyde Robinson. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Flickr