Why were Democrats trounced so soundly? Many of the losers—including Mark Udall of Colorado, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Michelle Nunn of Georgia, and Kay Hagan of North Carolina—were done in by state economies that are fundamentally a lot worse than the headline statistics show.
Consider Udall’s fate in Colorado, where the unemployment rate was only 4.7% in September, down from 8.5% only three years earlier, and not much above the 4% in 2007. Looks pretty healthy, right? The only problem is that Colorado’s labor force participation rate has plummeted by more than 5 percentage points since 2007, one of the biggest drops among the states. That means there are 220,000 Colorado residents who could be out looking for jobs, but aren’t, probably because they don’t like what they could get. Udall’s margin of defeat, as of this afternoon: roughly about 75,000 votes.
The same problem shows up in state after state. Mark Pryor faced an electorate where the labor force participation rate had dropped by almost 6 percentage points from 2007 to 2014, the largest decline of any state. That’s 135,000 Arkansas residents out of the workforce, who would have been there in 2007. Pryor’s margin of defeat is 143,000.
You get the picture. Here’s a list of the top worst states, ordered by decline in labor force participation rate since 2007.
