This is going to fry the two brain cells they have.
The Trump campaign called the report a “catastrophe” and said it was evidence of how badly Harris, the current vice president, has managed the economy.
But there is a deeper story about the October report, as well as a broader picture of the economy to consider before Tuesday’s election.
As MarketWatch reported, the increase in employment was the smallest since December 2020. Why? Blame an ongoing strike at Boeing and the effects of hurricanes Helene and Milton, all of which are temporarily obscuring the view of how much the labor market is cooling.
Follow MarketWatch’s live coverage of the October jobs report.
Those factors made the report a “head fake,” in the words of Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. He estimates the economy actually added about 150,000 jobs, or around the same number as in recent months.
“It is fair to say the job market remains rock-solid,” he said in a post on X.