Just after the first Presidential debate I heard a news commentator make the statement that, “states led by Republican governors have enjoyed lower unemployment than those with Democrat governors.” Rather than take this statement as pure fact, I decided to crunch the numbers and what I found was that she was absolutely right. I present here the findings of my analysis.
Initially I grabbed just the unemployment rate by month (January 2012 through August 2012) and got the following:
As you can see, month over month, Republican led states do indeed have a slight (the difference is minuscule in most cases) advantage over their Democrat counterparts. A colleague of mine suggested that I factor out those states where the Governor has been in office for less than two years to see if this held true. The logic behind his idea was that those who have been in office for less than two years would not have had a chance for their policies to truly take hold. Here are those results:
The number scale is smaller so the size of the bars might seem the same as above. In truth, they are not. There is a slightly more marked difference between the two.
Not satisfied with just pulling these numbers, I decided to pull in the party leadership of the Upper and Lower chamber for the state and compare those.
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