A new report from the United States Department of Labor released Thursday revealed that more than two million new unemployment claims were filed over the course of the last week, meaning the advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate is 14.8 percent. That’s over 5 points higher than the peak unemployment rate during the Great Recession of 2008-2009, which topped off at 9.2 percent in December 2009. Salon spoke to experts who agreed that, similar to previous recessions and depressions, the vast economic downturn is apt to have severe political consequences for the future of the United States, and is likely to push the country to the left.
The advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims in the week ending on May 30 was 1.877 million, according to a press release from the Labor Department. This marked a decrease of 249,000 from the previous week’s revised level. On the other hand, there were only under 190,000 initial claims in the comparable week from 2019. On top of the new unemployment insurance claims, 36 states reported a total of 623,000 new initial claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance. In total, 21.5 million people are collecting some form of state benefits.
“Typically those occur after a change, electorally,” Lichtman explained. “You had the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and the election of Barack Obama in 2008. You don’t usually get it from the incumbent administration, and I don’t think we’re going to get it from the Trump administration. So it’s all going to turn on November.”
J. Miles Coleman, the associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, expressed a similar view to Salon.
“We’re already intensely polarized as a country — people’s partisan preferences can influence everything from their shopping habits to dating life — but if the economic situation worsens, it certainly opens the door for radicalization,” Coleman told Salon by email. “When the economy suffers, voters tend to be more open to anti-establishment or populist candidates: during the Great Depression, Huey Long with his ‘Every Man a King’ slogan tapped into that sentiment, and was seen as a threat to Franklin Roosevelt.”