In Crucial Swing States in US Unemployment Rate Drops

Bolstering President Barack Obama's position on the economy, unemployment rates have fallen in nearly all the battleground states ahead of the November 6 presidential election. Several of the critical swing states, including Ohio, Iowa, Virginia and New Hampshire, appear to be doing a little better economically than the nation as a whole.

According to Politico, the 7.8 percent national rate, meanwhile, is being weighed down by states that are doing much worse, than Georgia and Mississippi, or big states like California, but those are not in play for November.

The Obama-friendly state-level trend is continuing, with new numbers showing the unemployment rate dropping in seven of nine key battlegrounds, the report said.

Unemployment in Ohio dropped to 7 percent from 7.2. In Iowa, the rate declined from 5.5 to 5.2 and in Wisconsin it dipped to 7.3 from 7.5, it added.

Joblessness was steady at a low 5.9 percent in Virginia in September and similarly held at 5.7 in New Hampshire.

"In pretty much every swing state, the numbers [favor] Obama," Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, said.

Advertisement

"The national polls, the national economic stats, are not nearly as important as the stats coming out of these battleground states," he added.

And this is especially the case in Ohio, Zandi argued.

Advertisement

"Seven percent unemployment rate is obviously a big improvement from where we were a few years ago," he said.

Source-ANI