Earlier this month, Larry Hogan, Maryland’s former governor, announced that he would not seek the presidency in 2024. Perhaps his dislike of Donald Trump led the pol to conclude that few of the GOP faithful would prove receptive to his candidacy.
Here’s an alternate theory: In the Rona era, no state has posted worse employment numbers than Maryland.
On Friday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released state-level data for February, giving economists and policy analysts the opportunity to examine what COVID-19 measures did to hiring and firing for exactly three years.
The good news for the nation is that America’s employment peak, the month before Everything Changed, was surpassed in June of last year. The downright disturbing news is that 22 states have yet to claw their way back to where they were in February 2020. That’s right — zero net job growth, for close to half the “laboratories of democracy.”
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