Georgia showed how much of a swing state it has become when, in the 2022 midterms, both conservative Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and liberal Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock were reelected. And it's a state that Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump will be paying close attention to in the months ahead, as Georgia — like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin — is among the Trump 2016/Biden 2020 states that will ultimately decide 2024's presidential election.
Most of the polls released in March showed Trump with narrow single-digit leads over Biden in the Peach State. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump led Biden in Georgia by 1 percent near the end of the month.
In Georgia, Trump and Biden are both campaigning on their economic records. But according to Bloomberg News' Matthew A. Winkler, Biden is the one who, economically, has the most to brag about in the Peach State.
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In an op-ed published on April 3, Winkler explains, "Georgia, whose population of more than 11 million makes it the eighth-largest state, is booming like it never did before Joe Biden became the 46th president. Not since such data initially was collected in 1990 has there been a three-year period when growth in the Peach State's manufacturing payrolls came close to matching the 11.9 percent increase in jobs since 2021 or its rate of employment gains compared with the U.S. overall, according to data compiled by Bloomberg."
Winkler adds, "There's no denying that Georgia’s labor market is superior to that of Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump, whose four years in the White House coincided with Georgia manufacturing employment declining faster than the rest of the nation — a dubious trend of every presidency in the new century except Biden's."
According to the Georgia Department of Labor, the state's unemployment rate was only 3.1 percent in January.
"Georgia's economic outlook is especially relevant because Americans are persistently reminded by the media that so much depends on the seven so-called swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that will determine whether Biden or Trump is reelected," Winkler observes. "The same polls rarely mention that the 45th president is a twice-impeached election denier facing four criminal indictments in four different cities, including one for election interference in Atlanta."
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Read Matthew A. Winkler's full Bloomberg News op-ed at this link.