President Trump faces the unenviable task of trying to win reelection with unemployment rates unseen since the Great Depression, but there is precedent for incumbents surviving increased joblessness.
A jobs report released Thursday showed another 3.8 million people in the United States filing for unemployment, totaling roughly 30 million in the six weeks since states began the coronavirus lockdowns. Those numbers constitute the worst job losses in history, with the unemployment rate now hovering around 20%.
During the Great Depression, unemployment hit an all-time high of just short of 25% and remained above 14% from 1931 to 1940. March 2020 was the largest one-month increase in the unemployment rate since 1975, with the number of unemployed people rising from 1.4 million to 7.1 million.
Some economists predict unemployment rising to 30% or even higher, a grim reality as states signal they’ll begin taking steps to reopen businesses in order to avoid further economic hardship.
Traditionally, a higher unemployment rate spells doom for an incumbent president. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected in 1932, did not see unemployment rate drop until a year into his presidency, although it spiked again in 1938 to just below 20%. Roosevelt went on to win a third term in 1940, carrying 38 states.
Barack Obama was elected in the throes of the Great Recession and saw the unemployment rate climb to nearly 10% in his first year. In November 2012, unemployment had dropped to 7.1% — a rate higher than the country had seen since 1984. When Obama first took office, the unemployment rate stood at 7.8%.
Despite the broken promises by Obama and his economic advisers that his policies would more significantly curb unemployment, he handily won reelection against Mitt Romney. Political analysts at the time said much of his win was attributed to a general feeling by the public that things were improving, even if they fell short of what many had anticipated.
When Ronald Reagan won reelection by 18 points in 1984, unemployment topped 7.2%. That was down from 10.8% at the peak of the 1982 recession.
Unemployment also increased during Richard Nixon’s first term, although that 1.9% rise didn’t stop him from winning a landslide victory in 1972. Both George W. Bush and Dwight D. Eisenhower also saw the unemployment level rise and their opponents using the economy as a key talking point against them, but they still won reelection, with Bush increasing his margin of victory from 2000 by nearly 3 percentage points.
Plenty of data exists that suggests the unemployment rate could spell trouble for Trump in November.
Three presidents in recent times, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush, lost their reelection bids when unemployment topped 7%. In the case of Ford, the number of jobless people rose by 2.9% from the beginning of his term. For Carter, the number remained unchanged at 7.5%. The elder Bush saw it climb to 7.4% from 5.4%.
Although most economists predict the unemployment rate will continue rising in the short term, Trump’s approval rating doesn’t appear to be particularly tethered to the number of people with a job.
On Thursday, a Gallup poll found Trump with one of the highest approval ratings in his presidency so far at 49% approval versus 47% disapproval. A RealClearPolitics average of surveys from April 14 through April 29 has 45% of the public approving of his performance, with 51.4% disapproving.
