Biden Rips Red States, Says They ‘Screwed Up’ Their Economies. The Facts Differ.

In a recent interview on MSNBC, President Joe Biden took another shot at red states, claiming they “really screwed up in terms of the way they handled their economy.”

Biden told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, “I got a lot of criticism, understandably. We’ve invested more in red states than blue states. … For two reasons. One: red states really screwed up in terms of the way they handled their economy, the way they handle manufacturing and the way they handle supply chains.”

Biden then launched into one of his stories that may or may not have been apocryphal: “You know, I remember being out in Iowa, and I remember one of the big issues was there was a plant, a small plant of 300 people, been around for 70 years; my grandfather worked there, I worked there, my son works there, and they had the best education system at the time and made it the best state education system in the country, and all of a sudden the kid comes home after he graduates and says, ‘Mom, I gotta leave. There’s no job for me here. The factory shut down.’ Well, guess what? How do you run a country that way? How do you do that?”

Biden’s jab at red states simply does not comport with reality. As The Republican National Committee pointed out last September, Labor Department data showed that through last August, “16 of the top 20 states for jobs recovered since the coronavirus pandemic began are led by Republican governors, and 16 of the states have Republican-controlled legislatures. Out of the top 10 states with the least jobs recovered, eight are Democrat-led. Republican-led states, on average, have recovered 143 percent of their lost jobs compared to just 118 percent for Democrat-run states.

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The Wall Street Journal reported in July 2022:

By many measures, red states—those that lean Republican—have recovered faster economically than Democratic-leaning blue ones, with workers and employers moving from the coasts to the middle of the country and Florida.Since February 2020, the month before the pandemic began, the share of all U.S. jobs located in red states has grown by more than half a percentage point, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the Brookings Institution think tank. Red states have added 341,000 jobs over that time, while blue states were still short 1.3 million jobs as of May.

To track each state’s progress toward normal since the pandemic began, Moody’s Analytics developed an index of 13 metrics, including the value of goods and services produced, employment, retail sales and new-home listings. Eleven of the 15 states with the highest readings through mid-June were red. Eight of the bottom 10 were blue.

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