New Weekly Claims Still Not Improving But Unlikely to Affect Recall

We have been tracking new weekly claims for unemployment benefits in California as an indicator of the direction of the state's labor market and economy. And we have been stuck over the entire summer at around 60,000 when normal would be something like 40,000.

As always, the latest claims data can be found at https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf.

Will this stall matter for the recall? Seems unlikely. News coverage of the recall and Gov. Newsom has been of the horse race variety: Now he's ahead! Now he's slipping! But the PPIC poll suggests nothing much has been happening.* Much of the breathless news coverage has been based on questionable polls that seem to arise to fill the news void. In contrast to those polls, the latest UC-Berkeley-IGS poll puts Newsom comfortably ahead.** 

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*https://www.ppic.org/publication/ppic-statewide-survey-californians-and-their-government-september-2021/.

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**https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1g8696rv

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Note: Here's a collection of ads from the recall: https://archive.org/details/jenner-recall-5-4-21. But apart from formal ads, the governor has been posting short ad-like items about various pandemic-related programs that he has implemented. He has been (wisely) moving away from long presentations which he otherwise loves to do in which he reels off data on this and that and towards shorter clips. Example: https://archive.org/details/newsom-9-1-21-wildfire/Relief+grant.mp4; https://archive.org/details/newsom-9-1-21-wildfire/homekey+9-8-21.mp4; https://archive.org/details/newsom-9-1-21-wildfire/newsom+9-1-21+wildfire.mp4.