Somehow, someway, the economy just keeps on keeping on. Despite numerous factors indicating that we’re long overdue for a recession, the latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that the longest bull market in history isn’t ending any time soon.
Our unemployment rate remained at a half-century record low of 3.6%, but most astounding was the 128,000 non-farm jobs added to the economy. Economists expected that figure to be a mere 75,000, a little more than half the actual amount. Strikingly, these aren’t coming from manufacturing, a sector that’s continued to crater over the past quarter. Instead, it’s come from growth in the food and drink service industries, as well as notable upticks in social assistance and financial activities.
And all that job growth came in spite of 46,000 GM jobs recorded as lost due to the 40-day union strike. They’ll be added back into the November report.
President Trump faces an increasingly popular impeachment proceeding with mounting evidence that he may have withheld congressionally-approved aid to Ukraine for his own personal political gain. In a vacuum, he’d be in serious trouble. But in key swing states, no one seriously cares about impeachment, and the plurality cares most about the economy. With numbers like these and a front-runner’s obvious weakness, Trump’s got a key advantage.
Despite her allegedly being a woman of color herself, Elizabeth Warren cannot consolidate any meaningful coalition of the minority vote. Joe Biden, the former front-runner, dominates among black voters, a mainstay of the Democratic electorate. Just today, Warren announced a disaster of a Medicare For All plan that would triple our annual federal deficit while jacking up taxes on the wealthy and middle class alike.
Biden’s base would be formidable against Trump’s numbers. But the economy has treated minorities so well that a candidate Warren could fall to Trump.
Speaking of which, black unemployment hit another record low, while Hispanic unemployment rate increased by just 0.2 percentage points from its September record low of 3.9%. Not only that, but wage growth has increased more for minorities than for whites, rising last month at an incredible 4.3% rate.
In head-to-head matchups, Warren still bests Trump by a sizeable margin. But he beats her in Iowa, North Carolina, and New Hampshire while coming close in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida. The guy who announced his candidacy by referring to Mexican immigrants as “rapists and murderers” won’t win a majority of minority voters, but if they’re put off enough by Warren to stay home in a general election — as many of them did with Clinton — then she could be in serious trouble.
The economy remains Trump’s greatest selling point, and this jobs report continues to prove why Warren would be a uniquely vulnerable candidate against him.
