Commentary: This week in Bidenomics it’s jobs galore

The October jobs report was a dud, with hurricanes and the Boeing (BA) strike dampening hiring. Employers created just 12,000 jobs for the month, way below the average of 194,000 for the prior 12 months.

But employment will almost certainly rebound in the November count. Beyond that, the weak October number still continues a remarkable string of job gains under President Biden, just days before voters will pass judgment on the economic record Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris, have racked up.

Job growth has been positive every single month since Biden took office in January 2021. Donald Trump didn’t accomplish that during his one presidential term, from 2017 to 2021. Barack Obama did preside over an unbroken string of monthly job growth during his second term, from 2013 to 2017. But that was part of the wan recovery from the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009, a rebound many Americans found painfully slow.

Before that, no president enjoyed a perfect record on monthly job growth, going back to 1939. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton each came close in their second terms, reflecting the booming economies of the mid-1980s and late 1990s. But Reagan had one spoiler month when employment declined, while Clinton had three.

Biden still has three more months in office, so his perfect record isn’t complete. But there’s no reason to expect a late-game miss. The economy is growing, consumers are spending, and Federal Reserve interest rate cuts now provide a modest tailwind.

More important than Biden’s standing in the history books is the credit voters give Biden, and by extension Harris, for prosperity in real time. And it’s pretty obvious ordinary Americans are unimpressed.

Biden’s approval rating is a dismal 39%, more or less where it has been for the last two years. Biden’s approval sank as inflation crept up to its 9% peak in 2022. Inflation got a lot better, but Biden’s approval ratings didn’t. The year-over-year rate of price hikes is now just 2.4%. Biden has gotten no benefit from that.

Harris’s approval rating matters more, of course, since she replaced Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate over the summer. Voters like Harris better than Biden. Her approval rating is around 48%. An incumbent running for reelection would prefer an approval rating above 50%, but Harris is in the ballpark.

Voters also view Harris differently than Biden on the economy, which is the top election issue, as usual. Luckily for Harris, voters rate her higher than Biden on the economy, suggesting they don’t blame Harris for the top economic problem of the last three years, inflation. Yet there’s also not much evidence voters give either Biden or Harris credit for the record job growth of the post-COVID years.

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That’s not such a bad thing for Harris. If voters paid close attention to the monthly job numbers, then the lame tally for October would be a liability. The 12,000 new jobs in October was the lowest number by far of the Biden presidency. Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, could paint that as a sign of an imminent recession and amplify it everywhere on social media.

But voters don’t really care about the overall employment level. They don’t care about statistics in general. If they did, Biden would be much more popular, given that just about everything has been going right in the economy, except for inflation.

What voters do care about is the price of milk and chicken at the grocery store, the price of gasoline, the bite rent takes out of their budget, and what the job market feels like wherever they live. Inflation has been coming down, of course, and to some extent, the election is a referendum on whether enough people feel high inflation is vanquished — and not coming back.

But the strong job market is still a meaningful plus for Harris. One thing she doesn’t have to explain to voters is high unemployment. In that sense, record job growth under Biden represents the absence of a problem for Harris.

It could be a lot worse.

Harris can tout the lowest unemployment rate — 4.1% — of any presidential candidate representing the incumbent party in nearly a quarter century. Barack Obama won reelection with a higher unemployment rate in 2012 (7.8%), as did George W. Bush in 2004 (5.5%). And neither had job growth close to that of the last three years. Strong job growth might not compel voters to pick Harris. But they certainly can’t hold it against her.

Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @rickjnewman.

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