One of my projects is finally done. I have been tracking state unemployment since the summer of 2020 in the midst of the pandemic. What I have found is that GOP governors consistently outperformed their Democratic counterparts.

GOP governors averaged 3.2 percent versus 3.9 percent for Democratic governors.

I also found that states with GOP controlling all aspects of government outperformed their Democratic counterparts. States with mixed government finished in between both GOP and Democratic controlled states.

In the bigger states, Republican governors also outperformed their Democratic counter parts. Florida led the way among the bigger states with unemployment at 2.5 percent.

The one good news for many blue states is that they opened up their economy in 2022. They reduced the margin versus GOP states. In August of 2020, Blue states unemployment was 24% higher than Reds states but by December 2022, 18%.

90 percent of the states with lower unemployment had Republican governors and 70 percent of states at the national average or lower had Republican governors.

States that opened their economy sooner had lower unemployment during the pandemic and afterwards. GOP states were more likely to open their economy and had lower unemployment as a result. GOP states were more likely to be under the national average.

Scott Adams asked recently about us Pandemic lockdown skeptic “No, I literally want to know how the people who were right knew it advance.  They know but won’t explain it.” This is an interesting questions and Adams wants to know how did we know the lockdowns and other efforts For me, It began with research on past pandemics and had a good idea what would happen.

There were many in the Trump administration early in the pandemic who viewed this as a Spanish flu returning and forecast 2,000,000 deaths from Covid.  Originally Fauci opposed this, but within a short period of time, he jumped on board.

Others looked at the numbers and did their own research. John Ioannidis and others found the lethality was lower than originally feared, but instead their data was rejected simply because it went against narrative. 

The 1957-8 flu season had per capita death similar to Covid in the first 6 months and the lockdown ever been tried on the large scale in a virus and it failed.  Common sense would tell you, shut the economy down and you will have an economy down and you will have an economic depression or at least severe recession.  April saw unemployment up to 14.7 percent and going into summer, unemployment stayed in double digit. 

In 1957-58 unemployment nearly doubled to 7.5 percent and recession happened.  There is very little articles on the impact of the flu on the recession but you have to assume that millions of Americans not working would have impact on productivity.    Anyone familiar with literature would have easily predicted the economic disaster the lockdown would produce. Unemployment went up to 14.7 and it took two years to recover these jobs. Those states that opened their economy, had lower unemployment from the worse of the pandemic to the present.

Groups like Rational Ground using data, saw the failure quickly and many specialists like the Great Barrington Declaration warned of the impact.  Data collected, and reviewing history gave us information needed to know a mistake was made.  

As for Adams question, we knew early because we looked at the actual facts and saw the flaws in the government data.  We also understood that government officials had their own objectives and were willing to manipulate the data to obtain those objectives.