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REUTERS: The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 7.9 percent in September, from 8.4 percent in August, a big drop that in normal times would be good news for a presidential incumbent seeking reelection soon. more than a month.
These are not normal times.
As the best-known summary statistic in the labor market, the US unemployment rate is a “psychologically important number” for voters, said Michael Brown, Visa’s chief US economist.
But President Donald Trump’s announcement on Friday that he had tested positive for the novel coronavirus pushes that number into the background: Voters may be “weighing virus-related news a little more than economic data right now.” Brown said.
The fall in the unemployment rate for September, reported by the Labor Department on Friday, extends a strong downward trend from 14.7 percent in April, which was the highest level since the Great Depression.
But other details in the report don’t easily fit Trump’s narrative of an economy coming to life.
Monthly labor earnings slowed. Overall, of the 22 million jobs lost since February, the economy recovered about half.
(Graphic: Jobs fell off a cliff – https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-ELECTION/ECONOMY-DATA/xlbvglzxepq/chart.png)
“Getting the other half back is going to be a lot more difficult,” said Michael Arone, chief investment strategist at State Street Global Advisors.
In particular, some 865,000 women left the workforce last month, data shows, roughly four times the number of men. Latinas accounted for more than a third of that decline, the report showed.
Those populations are key to Trump’s re-election hopes, as well as those of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The massive departure of women from their jobs coincided with the start of the school year in America, with many children learning online and at home.
“These numbers are really what parents have been yelling at for months, but in the form of economic data,” said Michael Madowitz, an economist with the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “I can’t imagine this helps win over the voters.”
Friday’s report counted more than 12 million Americans among the unemployed, a demographic less likely to appear at the polls than employed, studies https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/04/ behind-2018-united -states-midterm-choice-turnout.html have consistently shown.
But in the current context, there is a twist: Voter turnout among the unemployed tends to rise when overall unemployment is high.
Amber Wichowsky, a political science professor at Marquette University in Wisconsin, studied thousands of state and local elections and found that higher unemployment is associated with higher turnout, and Republican rulers “are more likely (than Democrats) to be. punished with bad unemployment figures. “
In the Nov.3 election, he said, it could well be different: The public health crisis could suppress voting if people are concerned about voting in person.
Furthermore, it is difficult to find a clear pattern linking unemployment rates with turnout in presidential elections or with the outcome.
(Graphic: Where Was Unemployment Before Last Election? – https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-ELECTION/ECONOMY/azgvoaegevd/chart.png)
The unemployment rate was nearly as high as it is now when voters elected Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, over Republican President Gerald Ford in 1976, when Carter lost to Republican challenger Ronald Reagan in 1980, and when Arkansas’s Democratic Governor Bill Clinton, overthrew Republican President George. HW Bush in 1992.
It was also almost as high when Americans re-elected Democratic President Barack Obama in 2012.
OTHER ECONOMIC NEWS
High-frequency data tracked by Reuters shows that shifts performed in a variety of industries increased last week and approached 95 percent of levels at the beginning of the year. Retail traffic estimates based on mobile phone data topped the March 1 level, before the state of emergency was declared, according to information from Safegraph https://www.safegraph.com/dashboard/covid19-commerce- patterns.
Consumer confidence in September spiked sharply, although a final https://data.sca.isr.umich.edu/fetchdoc.php?docid=66020 reading of the University of Michigan monthly survey on Friday suggested earnings they were driven by Democrats, with only small improvements between independents and Republicans.
The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits declined during the week ending Sept. 26, but remained high, the government reported Thursday, and personal income declined in August, underscoring the importance of another package. government bailout that economists say needs to be maintained. recovery continue to falter.
As of this week, the number of new COVID-19 cases had risen for two weeks in a row in 27 of the 50 US states.The course of the virus, Federal Reserve officials and others have repeatedly said, is essential for the economic outlook.
(Reporting by Ann Saphir; Additional reporting by Lucia Mutikani and Howard Schneider; Editing by Paul Simao)
