Here’s What The Last Jobs Report Before The Presidential Election Means For Voters

In the final jobs report before the upcoming presidential election, the U.S. added 661,000 jobs in September, the Labor Department said Friday.

The unemployment rate fell to 7.9% last month, after skyrocketing to 14.7% in April, according to the report. While the labor market has made modest gains, recovery is slowing in recent months. The economy added 1.4 million jobs in August, compared to 1.8 million in July and 4.8 million in June.

But will these numbers sway voters? Mark Hamrick, a senior economic analyst at Bankrate, says it’s possible.

“It’s a rhetorical question at this point: How many people are still awaiting further info to make a decision about the election?” he says. “It could well be that there is a component of the electorate which is still trying to rationalize that decision.”

For example, he pointed to those still left puzzled by Tuesday’s presidential debate, which was widely characterized by political commentators as chaotic. “There was not a lot of issue-oriented information to be distilled from that,” Hamrick says. “[The jobs report] is the last key data point on the economy before Election Day.”

The report also comes days after many large companies announced thousands of job cuts and layoffs, such as Disney, Goldman Sachs and Allstate. On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that 837,000 people filed new unemployment claims last week, which is on par with claims made in the past few weeks but far higher than claims made prior to the pandemic.

Still, 12.6 million were unemployed in September—1 million less than those in August, according to the Labor Department. While both the unemployment rate and the number of people unemployed have declined for the past five months, both are higher than they were in February by 4.4% and 6.8 million, respectively.

Hamrick said September payroll gains were on the disappointing side, as they were below expectations and well below the pace seen in previous months. However, he noted it’s important to remember that voting has already begun via absentee ballots in many states. For the bulk of Americans, Friday’s report may only serve to affirm previously held perceptions about the economy.

Matt Notowidigdo, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, urged voters to pay attention to broader labor market trends and to resist putting too much weight on Friday’s numbers. “It’s just one poll,” he says. “It’s not telling us the full picture.”

Despite being released in the same week as the first debate, associate professor of public policy at American University Bradley Hardy says he would be surprised if the report swayed voters. In regards to the labor market, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden seemed to have a “real acute focus” on the health and economic situation that people are facing, he noted.

“I think President Trump was benefiting from a long economic expansion that continued during his presidency and predated him,” Hardy says. “There is a flip side to that coin. He’s now presiding over a historic economic collapse, which coincides with a public health crisis. There are some challenges there before him.” 

Though it’s clear that the unemployment rate is trending in the right direction, he says, it’s not representative of what’s happening in the job market today. Many people have been laid off and will drop out of the labor force completely.

“We’ve always seen over the last several decades that employers use recessions as an opportunity to innovate and employ different forms of automation,” Hardy says. “Some of those jobs very well may not come back, even when there is a recovery.”