Job seeker Chad Halter of Milwaukee fills out an application during a QPS job fair. Credit: Kristyna Wentz-Graff

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As it reported a drop in the state unemployment rate Thursday, the administration of Gov. Scott Walker also announced that Wisconsin had added 106,100 private-sector jobs in the first three years of the governor's first term.

Job creation trends remain one of the state's most hotly debated political issues. As he ran for office in 2010, Walker made job creation his No. 1 campaign promise, vowing the state would add 250,000 private-sector jobs by the end of his four-year term.

Now in his fourth year, Walker is expected to seek a second term and already is running ads attacking his main Democratic opponent.

"Wisconsin added 106,100 private-sector jobs from December 2010 through December 2013," according to a monthly jobs report Thursday from the state Department of Workforce Development.

Mathematically, it appears unlikely that Wisconsin will meet Walker's employment objectives, said Marquette University economics professor Abdur Chowdhury.

"Even with an estimated 106,000 private-sector jobs created in the last three years, Gov. Scott Walker is less than halfway toward meeting his promise," Chowdhury said. "To meet Walker's 250,000 pledge, the state would have to create in one year 38,000 more jobs than during the previous three years combined. By another measure, it would have to add 12,000 jobs each month of 2014."

The three-year jobs tally was an unusual addition to the state's monthly jobs report.

The agency reported that Wisconsin's unemployment rate dropped to 6.1% in January, down from 6.3% in December and 6.5% in October, and dropping to its lowest point since November 2008.

The agency also reported that Wisconsin did not add any new private-sector jobs in January. However, the preliminary monthly estimates are subject to major revisions.

The data apply to January, even though they were released in March, about a month later than usual. The delay for January's monthly jobs data is an annual occurrence, stemming from each year's efforts to revise and "rebenchmark" the previous year's data. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics carries out the revisions.

January's trends mirrored national developments in the same month. According to preliminary estimates released six weeks ago, the entire nation added a tepid 145,000 private-sector jobs in January. But the January unemployment rate dipped to 6.6% from 6.7% in December.

Economists seldom read too much into one month's data, which are notoriously inaccurate. The federal government every month conducts two separate employment surveys and breaks out its findings for each state. In Wisconsin, it polls 3% of the state's employers to extrapolate the head count on jobs while it bases the unemployment rate on a survey of 0.06% of the state's households. Because of the small samples, the monthly surveys typically have significant inaccuracies that are later revised.

An example of the inaccuracy was on display in Thursday's report, which found Wisconsin's state government agencies alone added an estimated 5,100 newly created positions. For a state administration operating under a regime of austerity, the creation of that many jobs in a single month is implausible.

In order to carry out its revisions each year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics relies on a special set of wage and employment data called the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.

While the monthly survey is based on an unreliably small sample, the Quarterly Census is based on a census of 96% of the state's public- and private-sector employers, making it the most comprehensive and accurate reading of hiring in America.

But census data are released with a time lag of as long as seven months, which means it sometimes gets less attention than the monthly numbers, which are released within two weeks of each month's end.

The next release of the Quarterly Census is due Wednesday.

The most recent quarterly census, released in December, showed that Wisconsin added private-sector jobs at a 1.0% rate in the 12 months from June 2012 through June 2013, which ranked the state 37th among the 50 states in the pace of job creation during that period. The quarterly report tracks the economy in rolling 12-month increments, measured every three months.

Under the quarterly census, Wisconsin has trailed the national rate of job creation since July 2011. The United States created private-sector jobs at a rate of 1.9% in the latest 12-month period, nearly double Wisconsin's 1.0% rate.