(Reuters) – U.S. The unemployment rate fell to 9.9% in September from 4.4% in August, which is big news for the demand for a month-long election for the presidency in normal times.
This is not a normal time.
As the best summary statistics of the labor market, U.S. Unemployment is a “psychologically important number” for voters, said Michael Brown, chief American economist at Visa.
But President Donald Trump’s announcement on Friday that he has tested positive for the novel coronavirus pushes that number into the background: voters may now weigh in on news related to the virus rather than economic data.
The September decline in the employment rate, reported by the Labor Department on Friday, extends the trend to a lower level than the 14.7% recorded in April, the highest level since the Great Recession.
But other details in the report do not easily fit into Trump’s narrative of economics returning to life.
Business slows down in monthly jobs. Overall, of the 22 million jobs lost since February, the economy has nearly halved.
Jobs fell off a cliff
“It will be very difficult to get the other half back,” said Michael Arrow, chief investment strategist at State Street Global Advisors.
Significantly, about 865,000 women left the labor force last month, data shows, four times more than the number of men. The report shows that Latinos accounted for more than a third of the decline.
That population is key to Trump’s hopes of re-election as well as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The mass exodus of women from their jobs Consistent with the beginning of the school year, in which many children were learning online and at home.
“These numbers have really been screaming parents for months, but in the form of economic data,” said Michael Medowitz, an economist at the Center for Leaning on the Left of American Progress. “I can’t imagine this will help voters win.”
Friday’s report counts more than 12 million Americans in unemployment, which is less than the number of people who vote compared to the number of people who are employed.
But in the current context, there is a disorder: when overall unemployment is high, turnout increases among those who do not come out of work.
Amber Vikowski, a professor of political science at Marquette University in Wisconsin, has studied thousands of state and local elections and found that unemployment is associated with higher turnout, and Republican officials are more likely to be punished by the number of bad jobs (than Democrats). ”
Nov. In the November election, he said, it could be different: a public health crisis would suppress voting if people were concerned about voting in person.
Moreover, it is difficult to find a clear pattern linking the unemployment rate in the presidential election, or in the result.
Where was the unemployment before the last election?
Unemployment was almost high when voters elected Democrat Jimmy Carter over Republican President Gerald Ford in 166, when Carter lost to Republican challenger Ronald Reagan in 1980, and when Republican Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton was ousted by Republican President Clinton. HW Bush in 1992.
It was almost as high as when Americans elected Democratic President Barack Obama in 2012.
Other economic news
High-frequency data tracked by Reuters shows that shifts worked on various industries increased this past week and reached 95% at the beginning of the year. According to SafeGraph, before the state of emergency was declared, retail traffic estimates based on cellphone data went above their March 1 level.
The final reading here in a monthly survey from the University of Michigan on Friday suggested that Democrats benefited only with minor improvements between independents and Republicans.
The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits fell, but personal income in Remaining Gust showed the importance of another government rescue package, which economists say needs to be kept, the government said in a report released Thursday. Next recovery from flag waving.
If we go this week, the U.S. The number of new Covid-19 cases in 27 of the 50 states increased for two consecutive weeks. The course of the virus, Federal Reserve officials and others have repeatedly said it is paramount to the economic outlook.
Reported by Ann Safir; Additional reports by Lucia Mutic and Howard Snyder; Edited by Paul Simao
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