The state’s highest jobless rate is now in the New River Valley, not Northern Virginia

Most sports teams have one mascot. The Washington Nationals baseball team has four —caricatures of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt who engage in the “Racing Presidents” contest between the top and bottom of the fourth inning at every home game.

From time to time, a fifth president has joined them — William Howard Taft for a few seasons because he inspired the traditional “seventh inning stretch,” Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover for a single season apiece as part of a marketing deal tied to the White House Historical Association’s Christmas ornament sales.

Perhaps it is time to add a new presidential mascot to the mix: Donald Trump. The Nationals are mired in last place, but Trump has given them hope for a solution to their losing ways: Fire the scorekeeper.

That’s what Trump did last week when he fired the head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — after the bureau issued a disappointing report on job growth. 

That’s part of the prompt for today’s column: Just what is the state of Virginia’s economy? The other prompt is the governor’s race unfolding in Virginia, where Trump’s downsizing of the federal government has given Democrats a convenient talking point, exacerbated by Republican Winsome Earle-Sears insisting that losing a job isn’t a “huge, huge thing,” which is probably not the best way to handle the situation.

At the risk of falling into the trap of “lies, damned lies and statistics,” let’s see what economic statistics tell us about how the Virginia economy is doing about six months into Trump’s attempts to remake the American economy. 

Jobless rate is low, but unemployment is growing faster than most states

Some employment is seasonal, so rather than compare summer statistics to winter statistics, it’s probably fairer to compare the latest figures — from June — with June 2024. Otherwise, we might mistake ordinary seasonal changes for some trend that doesn’t really exist.

Nationally, the unemployment rate remains the same that it was a year ago — 4.1% in June 2024, 4.1% in June 2025. 

Beneath that seemingly unchanging surface number, some states have seen their numbers go up, others have seen theirs go down. Virginia is among the former. Our unemployment rate has edged up from 2.8% last June to 3.5% this June.

That overall figure is low, but the growth rate is on the high side. It’s not the highest, though. Mississippi has seen the fastest growth in unemployment — from 2.9% to 4.0%. 

While I did caution about comparisons other than year-to-year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in its recent report, did call attention to what it called “statistically significant unemployment rate changes from May 2025 to June 2025, seasonally adjusted.” Just one state qualified for a “statistically significant” increase in unemployment: Virginia. 

As with many numbers, there are multiple ways to read these. You can look at these and say that Trump’s downsizing of the federal government is driving one of the fastest spikes in unemployment in the country. Or you can look at these and say that in spite of those changes, Virginia’s unemployment rate remains low — and below the national average. Both are true.

There’s an old saying that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job, a depression is when you lose yours. With that in mind, let’s drill down into these numbers to see what’s happening across Virginia, because unemployment rates do traditionally vary from place to place. 

The state’s highest jobless rate is now in the New River Valley, not Northern Virginia

I touched on some of these numbers in Thursday’s column, so if they sound familiar, that’s why: The unemployment rate in Northern Virginia is rising, but the rate in much of the region remains just under the state average. Fairfax County now is just above the state average with 3.6% unemployment; Falls Church is at 4.0%. 

The highest unemployment in Virginia is in rural Southwest and Southside; that’s almost always the case. This is also where we’re seeing unemployment rise the fastest. The highest unemployment rate in the state in June was in Pulaski County — at 8.0%. A year ago, it was just 3.1%. That’s driven by layoffs at the Volvo truck plant in Dublin — and those layoffs were prompted, in part, by tariffs, according to the company.

While Trump’s downsizing of the federal government has naturally gotten attention, if you want to find a bigger impact of his policies, you’d best look in the New River Valley and not Northern Virginia. 

We also see a big increase in unemployment in and around Emporia, where the Georgia-Pacific plywood plant is shutting down. Unemployment in Emporia has jumped from 4.9% to 6.3%; in neighboring Greensville County, it’s gone from 3.9% to 5.7%. Those job losses can’t be pinned on a specific party, although they do speak to the nation’s inability to hold down housing costs, so in a way both parties are culpable here. (See my previous column on those job losses). 

Big picture: Every locality in Virginia saw its unemployment rate rise over the past year. Some (such as Northern Virginia and New River) we can tie to Trump, some we can’t.  

There are six reasons why we hear so much about the federal job cuts as opposed to, say, other layoffs, tariff-related or otherwise:

1. They are related to a dramatic federal policy, where the cause-and-effect is clear.
2. The sheer number of people involved.
3. They’re taking place in a region not accustomed to employment fluctuations.
4. They’re taking place in a region with more media outlets to call attention to the change, such as this headline recently in ArlNow: “Arlington unemployment rate increases again, up 55% year-over-year.”
5. They’re taking place in the state’s economic engine — 42% of state revenues come from Northern Virginia, so anything that endangers that economy endangers the whole state. As I’ve pointed out before, rural school systems get most of their money from the state, which is to say they get the biggest chunk of it from Northern Virginia. We need Northern Virginia to do well economically. Like it or not, Virginia has lived with less-than-favorable economic numbers from many rural areas for a long time.
6. These job losses are concentrated in a Democratic part of the state, which makes them a good rallying point for the party to motivate a higher turnout in an off-year election. By contrast, the job losses are often in Republican-voting areas where Democrats are less likely to pick up votes. Otherwise, we’d see every statewide candidate for governor standing outside the gates of the Volvo plant (or showing up in rural Virginia more than they normally do).

Virginia is growing jobs but at less than the national rate

We’ll now switch metrics from year-over-year to year-to-date. What irked Trump in the most recent report was that job growth wasn’t as strong as he thought it should be. Economists generally called the job growth “weak” or “disappointing” or “sluggish.” They might be right, but that’s also an expectations game that I don’t feel qualified to play. Let’s just look at raw numbers.

Year-to-date, which covers the second Trump term plus a few other weeks, the economy has added 1,854,000 jobs — a growth rate of 1.18%.

During the same period in 2024, the economy added 2,220,500 jobs — at a rate of 1.43%. So, yes, an economy that voters weren’t happy with last year has slowed down. 

During the first half of 2024, Virginia added 65,500 jobs — at a rate of 1.58%, so faster than the national average.

During the first half of 2025, Virginia added 47,800 jobs — at a rate of 1.12%, so lower than the national average.

Economists have cited multiple reasons for the slow growth — uncertainty over trade and restrictions on immigration being the most commonly cited. Trump wants to see lower interest rates, which he says will spur the economy. The danger is that lower interest rates would also fuel inflation, which brings us to that measure.

Inflation remains higher than in Trump’s first term

When Trump unwillingly turned over the presidency to Joe Biden in January 2021, inflation was 1.4%. It almost immediately shot up, topping out at 9.1% in June 2022. By then, Biden was probably done for politically. Post-pandemic inflation wasn’t limited to the United States, but American voters weren’t concerned about that; they were concerned about their own situation. Democrats discounted inflation at their peril. By the time early voting started in September 2024, it was down to 2.4%, but that didn’t matter to voters. It also started rising again after that, triggering more bad memories. When Trump took office in January, inflation was running at 3%. Since then it’s come down some — dropping to 2.3% in April — but is now up to 2.7%. The inflation monster may still be slain; it appears to still be twitching. Inflation is certainly higher than it was during his first term when inflation was almost always under 2.0%. 

Trump has a right to claim that he’s still dealing with the after-effects of Biden-era inflation. However, we don’t know yet what tariffs will do — they could also be inflationary. Trump believes tariffs will lead to companies producing more goods domestically. If that happens, that’s a long-term consequence. In the meantime, higher costs for imported goods are a short-term pain. We certainly have not seen the pay-off yet. Manufacturing jobs — something Trump has been focused on — are down ever so slightly since he took office, according to the Federal Reserve. In historical terms, they’re essentially flat.

Wage growth is trending downward, but remains higher than Trump’s first term

The economy may be complicated, but it operates on simple principles: Supply and demand, both for goods and labor. Coming out of the pandemic, we saw both high inflation and high wage growth. The problem for workers is that the high wage growth didn’t keep up with even higher prices — but wage growth helped drive that inflation. 

Wage growth peaked at 6.7% in summer 2022 (the same time that inflation was peaking at even higher rates), according to the Federal Reserve. By the time Trump took office, inflation was down — but so was wage growth. In January, it was running at 4.1%. Since then, it’s toggled between 4.3% and 4.2%. The Economic Policy Institute has slightly different numbers but the same trend: Wage growth shot up with inflation, then slowed as inflation ebbed. However, wage growth in 2025 remains higher than during the first half of Trump’s first term, when it generally ran under 3%; in the last half, it topped 3% and was running at 3.4% before the pandemic hit.

One theory on immigration is that reducing immigration will drive up demand for workers — and increase wages. However, as we’ve seen, higher wages also lead to inflation — and many businesses are turning to automation instead. That’s one reason why manufacturing employment has essentially remained flat for years, even though manufacturing output has gone up. We now produce more goods with fewer workers. Some might also say that’s why tariffs are misguided: To increase manufacturing employment, what we really need are more exports, but tariffs provoke retaliatory tariffs that risk decreasing exports.

Whatever the reasons, these are the numbers. Do with them what you will. The problem with many economic numbers is that they are a proverbial glass of water — half full or half empty, depending on your perspective.

For better or worse, baseball is more objective, and the Nationals still lost Thurday to the homeless Athletics by 6-0. Sometimes the problem isn’t the scorekeeper, it’s the team.

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