How Trump’s Presidency affected unemployment and graduation rates
No matter where you stand, you can agree that Donald Trump’s presidency was an extremely divisive time and he was a controversial figure. He spoke brazenly in almost every public speech he gave and incited a lot of hate in our country. He was someone who shook up the political game and at the time he went into the presidency, the world had shifted drastically since the last controversial political figure.
When dissecting the data that was given, I struggled to find something unusual. However, as I narrowed down what period I wanted to look at, I found an interesting correlation between unemployment rates and high school graduation rates. I remember there was a lot of talk about unemployment rates during his presidency but I never got a look at the numbers. I grew up in downtown Chicago and lived there during Trump’s presidency so I was in an extremely liberal environment. I was focused on social issues more than economic issues. Going over and looking at these numbers with a fresh set of eyes helped me understand that time a little bit better even though I lived through it.
I went through the unemployment rates from 2016 to 2020. I found that there were two columns of approval rates for Trump from 2016 to 2020. I also went into unemployment rates more specifically in 2017, 2018, and 2019. I wanted to make a story on how the unemployment rates had changed over his presidency and if misinformation had been spreading around.
Above is a chart that organizes the unemployment rates by state. This isn’t the unusual relationship that I wanted to explore but found it crucial to put into the project. It was important to collect the data necessary for the full story.
This is the first year we are looking at. Trump was voted into office at the end of 2016 and this is his approval rates stacked against the unemployment rates. Employment seemed to be at a low point since the x-axis range is much higher than the other graphs that I looked at. The range has a max of 25, which is the highest out of all the graphs. So, from this graph alone, it seems there were a lot more unemployed people at this time. It’s also what Trump essentially ran his campaign on. He was not a politician so he was for the people, not for the system. He mentioned a lot of how other countries were “taking our jobs” and how our economy was failing while “theirs” thrived. Most sources say that the unemployment numbers were not due to immigration. That article says immigrants were taking jobs that were not even going to be taken by a born and raised U.S. citizen, which means they were filling gaps that would’ve been there if they hadn’t filled them.
The next data to get was Trump approval rates in 2020 compared to the unemployment rates in 2020. There are a couple of things to note in this graph and the unemployment rates. The Covid-19 pandemic unfortunately was a really hard time in America. There was a sense of unknowing what would be next that struck fear in a lot of Americans. A lot of people were fired or budget cuts hit and they had to lay people off during this time. It makes sense why unemployment rates were so low and why each state has a piece of data in the scatterplot that acts as an outlier to these states. The range is much lower than in 2016, which is another factor to consider. Some of these states, like Arkansas or Kentucky, have had much worse unemployment rates than in 2020.
However, a last piece to consider is how low the unemployment rates were in 2019 alone. The range of unemployment is the lowest out of all the graphs I created. The maximum percentage of unemployment was under 9% compared to the 25% that was the range when Trump first entered office.
I do not support Trump or his views. However, deep diving into these data points gave me new insight into his presidency and why exactly people could love him. It was so divisive when he was in office that I feel my look at that time was skewed based on what I believed so passionately about. It seems unemployment rates were extremely low in 2019, showing that during Donald Trump’s presidency, he improved our economy to be able to lower those rates. Before the pandemic, he was almost taking preventative action to be able to keep those rates low as well. When it could’ve been at it’s worst, it wasn’t.
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