| Des Moines Register
Watch: In Iowa rally, President Trump praises foreign leaders, knocks Joe Biden
“President Xi of China, he’s 100%. Putin of Russia, 100%. … Kim Jong Un of North Korea, 100%,” Trump said. “These people are sharp, and they’re smart. “
The signs of a bad economy greet West End Architectural Salvage owner Don Short every morning.
He finds people asleep in their cars in his Southwest Ninth Street parking lot in Des Moines. On Monday, as snow began to fall harder, he said some people without homes asked to wait out the cold in his shop. At his daughter’s middle school, he heard the families of 10 boys couldn’t afford a $75 fee to play on the football team this year.
Short, 59, who is also a partner at 10 restaurants, has had his own issues as the economy collapsed amid business lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But compared to others, he said, the problems aren’t so bad.
It would seem like a relief, then, that on Tuesday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report showing that Iowa’s unemployment rate had improved to 4.7% in September, the fifth lowest for any state and down from an adjusted 6.3% in August.
The state has added about 7,300 jobs from August to September, according to the BLS’ survey of employers in Iowa. Though the recovery has significantly slowed since early summer, the state has recovered about 60% of the jobs lost after the pandemic shut down businesses in mid-March.
But it’s not clear whether the favorable report, the last glimpse of Iowa’s economy during President Donald Trump’s term before the Nov. 3 election, will help seal the deal for him and other Republicans in Iowa for people like Short.
A self-described moderate Republican, Short said a healthy economy is the most important issue to him. And, generally speaking, he believes the economy does better when his party is in charge.
But, he said Trump is a “bully,” and he worries about the example Trump sets for his daughter. He said he thinks he might break down and vote for Joe Biden, even though he worries the country won’t recover as strongly under a Democratic president.
Ask him later this week, and the answer might change.
“A good economy benefits everyone,” he said. “We can’t have good, Democratic support of people without a good economy. And having a good Republican economy means you can’t shut everyone out. You have to support people. I don’t know if I can make it any simpler than that.”
The economy was the top issue among likely voters who participated in a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll in September.
Iowa State University economist Dave Swenson described Iowa’s economic performance under Trump as a “mixed bag.”
The president inherited a strong economy when he took office in January 2017. Iowa’s unemployment rate was 3.4%. It got even stronger from there, hovering between 2.5% and 2.8% for much of his first term.
In Trump’s first two years in office, the state added about 21,400 jobs. That’s about twice as many new jobs as the state saw in former President Barack Obama’s last two years in office.
However, job growth stalled after January 2019, a change Swenson blamed on Trump’s trade war with China. While government subsidies supported farmers, other businesses suffered from the cut-off in trade.
The manufacturing sector, for example, peaked during Trump’s term with about 227,000 jobs in Iowa in June 2019. That figure was down about 4,000 just before the pandemic began and since has fallen to 220,000.
Swenson said a drop in commodities prices from a 2014 peak meant fewer purchases of agricultural equipment. Some factories also lost customers as the fracking industry declined. Swenson said rural counties and the city’s smallest communities felt this impact most.
“There’s an irony to that of, course,” he said. “People talk about this president. He was elected based on non-metropolitan, working-class, non-college support. That non-metropolitan, working-class, non-college supporter more than likely found their prospects stagnant or declining (under Trump).”
While the state’s job recovery in the recession, at 60%, is stronger than the 55% rate for the country overall, the statistic doesn’t capture the full extent of the loss during the pandemic, Swenson said.
The size of the state’s labor force — the people who either have jobs or are looking for work — has dropped every month since March. The labor force is now about 100,000 people smaller than it was at the beginning of the pandemic, implying that many people in the state don’t want to or can’t work amid the pandemic.
Troy Bradley, 49, said he has not been able to find work since the pandemic began. Bradley studied web development and data science at Lamda School, a coding boot camp.
Bradley, who moved in with his mother in Perry, said the economy is his top issue this year. But the former Andrew Yang campaign volunteer is frustrated with Democratic leaders in the House for turning down a stimulus package offer from Senate Republicans, who had rejected a larger Democratic proposal.
Bradley received his absentee ballot this month but hasn’t decided how he will vote.
“I am really struggling with that,” he said. “I really am.”
David Gomez, 41, a risk project manager in Dallas County, said he’s going to vote for Trump like he did in 2016 because he thinks Democrats will hurt the economy. He applauded Gov. Kim Reynolds for allowing some businesses to partially reopen in late May and said he believes Democrats will force businesses to stay closed longer than necessary.
In Dubuque, 37-year-old Kris Hoffman voted for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson in 2016. But this year, he will pick Biden, in part because he is frustrated with how Republicans have reacted to the pandemic.
The owner of a gym, Hoffman collected unemployment as he closed his business in early March. He also received a low-interest loan through a congressional stimulus package.
Still, he could barely pay the bills, and even as the state allowed him to reopen, he said, a customer testing positive for COVID-19 highlighted the weakness of the government’s response to the virus. The customer said she didn’t hear from the state until two weeks after the test, and with no contract tracing system in place, Hoffman scrambled to warn other customers.
He said his family already lived on a modest budget and was able to adjust as his income decreased, adding less expensive meals like beans and rice to their dinner rotation. But the gym’s utilities, rent and insurance payments on the gym were too expensive.
Hoffman sold the business last month, at about half the price that another suitor offered a year earlier. He applied for unemployment again.
He argued that the COVID-19 response will be better under Biden.
“It can be really helpful to unlocking our economy — testing people, getting that right,” he said. “When we first encountered it, it was like the Wild West. It was just like, ‘Here’s the guidance from the CDC.’ … The current administration has missed the ball.”
Iowa State economist Peter Orazem said China will probably continue to purchase many farm commodities, despite the trade war.
But he believes the finance sector that’s important to Iowa could struggle under ambitious Democratic plans, like the Green New Deal, which calls for more government intervention in many industries.
Whoever is president, he said the state won’t recover without a vaccine and widespread immunity to the virus.
“It’s sort of hard to know if we are going to be moving our way back to normality in January,” Orazem said. “And which January is it? Is it 2021 or 2022? Twenty-twenty has been a pretty lousy year. It’s the Year of the Rat, and I’m proposing that the Chinese Zodiac permanently get rid of the rat and pick another animal.”
Tyler Jett covers jobs and the economy for the Des Moines Register. Reach him at [email protected], 515-284-8215, or on Twitter at @LetsJett.
