Updated "gold standard" jobs report show a big North/South difference in Wisconsin

Got the new, thorough figures from the "gold standard" Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) today. This includes all sectors of the US jobs market, and goes down all the way into the county level for all states, including Wisconsin.

In the numbers for our state, we had decent-but-not great gains in jobs between September 2022 and September 2023 - 27,736 total jobs added, a rate of slightly under 1.0%. What strikes me is the geographic disparity in job stats among Wisconsin counties. Most counties in the southern third of the state had gains, and some by quite a bit. But most counties in central and northern Wisconsin weren't doing as well, and many lost jobs.

Those areas in orange and red are many of the areas of Wisconsin that have turned toward Republicans in the Trump era, which sounds like a great example of the conditions that seed the White Rural Rage phenomenon that has been well-summarized in a new book by Paul Waldman and Tom Schaller.

But if you try to pin this as a Biden-era trend, you're missing that the same thing was happening over the 12 months that ended in September 2019, when Donald Trump was allegedly presiding over "the greatest economy ever".

And given that Republicans are apparently going to try to play the "are you better off than you were four years ago" card (vs 2020? Bold move there, Cotton!), let's compare to where we were in the pre-COVID times of September 2019, and where we were on September 2023.

Overall, the QCEW says the state has gained a little over 41,500 jobs between September 2019 and September 2023 (+1.43%). But some places have gained quite a bit more than 1.43%.

On the numerical side, stop me if you've heard this before, but Dane County's growth is nearly twice as large as anyone else's. Most of the other largest gainers in the state are in either suburbs/exurbs, or counties on the border of another state.

But we also saw more than half of the state's counties lose jobs over those four years. The highest percentage losses were in rural counties in western, central and northern Wisconsin, with the biggest drop in Jackson County, which shed more than 1 out of the 10 jobs they had.

However, those large % losses are in small-population counties. When you look at the raw numbers, Milwaukee County had by far the largest deficit in jobs out of all of the counties in the state. Down 18,680 jobs in the QCEW reports.

Maybe that whole "defund Milwaukee" thing that WisGOP used as a strategy to stir up MAGA voters isn't something that works out well for an economy (note how Ozaukee County is also on that chart). Maybe the new sales tax and added investments into the state's largest City could reverse the bad numbers on jobs in the area as well.

These new numbers illustrate that while the state is in better economic shape than it was 4 years ago, and continued to grow in 2023, there are places that have lagged behind. And just like how economic success often leads to more success and attractability for workers and businesses, lagging performance and job losses become something that requires a lot of effort to reverse. And Wisconsin lawmakers should be aware of the different outcomes and figure out ways to improve the laggards while keeping the good times going in the places that have been winning.