Do US jobs figures really affect the presidential election? | Callum Jones

As another presidential election rears into view, spare a thought for campaign operatives on the eve of the first Friday of each month. Aides used to functioning on little sleep struggle by on even less. Press releases and attack lines are meticulously prepared.

As the clock clicks to 8.30am, the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is refreshed repeatedly on hundreds of laptops and phones, until it finally lands: a 40-page statistical release entitled The Employment Situation.

The monthly jobs report is widely seen as a reliable indicator of the health of the US economy. But scrutiny of its contents typically reaches a whole new level in the closing stages of an election campaign.

“I cannot tell you the anxiety that you feel the night before, and that morning,” said Teddy Goff, digital director for Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. As polling day neared, and each jobs report rolled around, there was a palpable fear that “one bad month could take the entire enterprise down”, he recalled.

“Had there been a fluky month in October 2012 of negative growth,” said Goff, “you’re thinking, ‘OK, cool, we’ve just lost the White House.’”

And so, this Friday, as the first week of September drew to a close, staffers for both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris waited with bated breath on the latest official jobs numbers. Employers added 142,000 jobs in August – shy of expectations – and the unemployment rate slipped from 4.3% to 4.2%.

Both sides pounced. Joe Biden hailed “historic gains” for American workers since he and Harris took office, with almost 16m new jobs created; the Trump campaign declared that “warning lights” were flashing, as “fears of Kamala-induced recession” purportedly mounted.

Dozens of news outlets, including the Guardian, reported on the release – and what it could mean for the election. But does it matter?

“I don’t think there’s any voter who should change their vote based on Friday’s release,” said Jason Furman, who served as chairman of the council of economic advisers under Obama, “with the possible exception of the 12 voting members” of the Federal Reserve’s rate-setting policy committee.

“If you stopped the average person in the street, they would have no idea” how many jobs had been created, or how many people were out of work, in any given month, observed Stephanie Kelton, a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University. And even if they did, “people are not moving between camps because of a tenth of a percentage point shift in the unemployment rate,” she added.

With a campaign this close, however, anything can shift the dial. “When you’re in an election that’s basically tied, even very small events could be the difference between winning and losing,” said Furman. “In terms of economic data, there are really a very small number of big events between now and election day.”

Between now and 5 November, when tens of millions of Americans will cast their votes, there will be two updates to the consumer price index, the closely watched inflation gauge; two more jobs reports; and a gross domestic product (GDP) economic growth estimate for the third quarter. Each will be dissected, debated and described in great detail.

The world’s largest economy has reached a critical juncture at the exact moment when the US election kicks into its final gears.

When inflation surged to its highest level in a generation two years ago, policymakers scrambled – and ultimately raised interest rates to a two-decade high – in an attempt to cool the economy, and bring down price growth.

With inflation now heading back towards more typical levels, the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, has signaled that the central bank would start to cut rates this month. The US labor market now faces greater “downside risks”, Powell acknowledged.

The apprehension about this next phase was laid bare in August, when disappointing jobs data for the previous month triggered a sharp, albeit fleeting, global stock market sell-off. The sell-off was news around the world and brought greater – negative – attention to a jobs report that while weaker than expected was still positive.

While the US economy has staged a remarkable recovery from the depths of the pandemic, a majority of Americans do not appear to recognize this. A Harris poll for the Guardian in May, for example, found that 55% wrongly believed the economy was in recession.

“There is a degree to which people just perceive the economy to be worse than it is,” said Goff. “Part of it is just that the media has a bias toward negative stuff. The individual murderer gets reported on ad nauseam in the local news. The declining murder rate over the course of three decades doesn’t get any coverage. There’s that same phenomenon attached to the economy.”

There also appears to be a disconnection between how official economic data informs voters about the economy and how voters experience it in their day-to-day lives.

Does last month’s inflation reading matter when your grocery bill is up by a quarter in four years? How much attention would you pay to August’s nationwide unemployment rate if you, or a relative, had recently lost their job?

The Trump campaign, which claims Biden has destroyed jobs and fueled inflation, is clearly seeking the support of those directly affected by economic disruption since 2021.

“Voters, particularly the voters that will decide elections, they don’t think about the economy through the prism of any government statistics,” David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s 2008 campaign, told the Axe Files podcast in March. He later joined the Harris campaign as senior adviser.

Obama won in 2012 with the highest unemployment rate of any re-elected president since 1936. “It was coming down,” Plouffe noted, “so people felt good on trajectory.”

Should the Fed start reducing rates this month, as indicated, “perhaps at the margin, in the tiniest of ways”, some people might start to feel better about the economy, Kelton suggested. “Maybe there’s a little bit of a vibe shift in having the rate-cutting cycle begin, and knowing it’s under way.”

In a race this close, that vibe shift, or the lack of it, may well decide the race. Could the noise created by a few good or bad economic reports tip the balance?

For some time already, there has been a gulf between Americans’ words and actions.

Right now “when people have to put money behind their statements, they are very optimistic,” said Furman, now a professor at Harvard University. “They are spending lots of money. Businesses are investing a lot.”

And yet, “when they talk to pollsters and no money is at stake, they are quite negative,” he added. “When they get into the ballot box, will they think more like they do in a store, or when they’re talking to a pollster? No one knows.”