The strong September jobs report came out on Friday, with just over a month to go until the election. The better-than-expected numbers could help Vice President Kamala Harris’s bid for president.
In September, the U.S. economy added 254,000 jobs, and the jobless rate dropped from 4.2% to 4.1%. This is the second month in a row that it has gone down.
Live coverage of the September jobs report: 254,000 more jobs are added, and the jobless rate falls to 4.1%.
A Washington policy expert at Raymond James named Ed Mills told MarketWatch, “On the margin, good news is good news for the Harris campaign.”
There are several reasons why October’s job numbers might not be nearly as good. Still, the drop in the unemployment rate and good job growth last month gave Harris an answer to what Trump said in their September debate.
“They’ve had three-and-a-half years to do all the things we talked about and create jobs,” Trump said about Harris and Biden. “Why hasn’t she done it yet?”
The Trump campaign criticized Harris’s “weak economic policies” and the fact that factory jobs have been lost for two months in a row on social media on Friday. Harris’s campaign, on the other hand, focused on the job numbers.
But recent economic reports have been good, showing that growth is growing and a key measure of inflation is slowing down.
The most recent report on U.S. growth in the second quarter showed that the economy grew at a strong 3.0% yearly rate. For the third quarter, the same number is likely to come in.
The latest reading of the Federal Reserve’s preferred personal-consumption expenditures index shows that inflation has gone down from 2.5% to 2.2% over the past year. It had been that low since the beginning of 2021.
A new poll from the Cook Political Report shows that people are more likely to choose Harris over Trump when it comes to who they think will control inflation. The writers wrote that Trump’s 6-point lead from August “has evaporated” and gave a few reasons for the change.
“The first is that Harris’s message about the economy has been heard.” Harris has been running for office for two months now and her main message has been “affordability,” which means lowering the prices of drugs, stopping price gouging, and supporting affordable housing, according to the Cook poll.
Even though Friday’s report may be good news for Harris, there is still one more jobs report to come out on November 1, which could be worse for a number of reasons.
“A strike going on at Boeing” BA 2.98 BNP Paribas analysts wrote in a note that the reading that will be released on November 1 could be less clear because Hurricane Helene is still having an effect on job growth in the areas it hit and there is still a lot of uncertainty about the election.
Jeffry Bartash of MarketWatch said that the jobs report on Friday might not have been as good as it seemed. He said that over the past year, the government’s first estimate of how many new jobs are being made each month has been less accurate than normal.
Still, Mills of Raymond James says that the trend of jobs during the Biden term has been “pretty substantial.”
“The Harris campaign will do everything they can to use that against her,” he said.
