Last month, President Obama received a huge boost to his reelection campaign when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the unemployment rate had fallen below 8 percent for the first time since he was inaugurated in January 2009. The unemployment had hovered around 8.2 percent for the first eight months of this year.

The quick drop in September’s unemployment rate was driven by a historic 873,000 jump in the number of Americans telling BLS they were employed. Since 1950, the BLS had reported only one other month with a higher job gain: June of 1983, when 991,000 Americans got new jobs and the U.S. economy was growing 9.3 percent. Today, GDP is growing at just 1.3 percent.