Democrats in political jam with surprising jobs uptick

Economists and newspapers agreed: The report would show massive job losses and unemployment close to or exceeding 20%. But at 8:30 a.m. Friday, the Department of Labor revealed that the economy gained 2.5 million jobs in May and the unemployment rate fell to 13.3%.

The expected cudgel for bashing President Trump failed to materialize.

The disparity between expectations and reality about the jobs numbers could be the beginning of a larger problem for Democrats: A strong, swift recovery before the presidential election could hurt the party’s core arguments and electoral chances.

DNC chair Tom Perez downplayed the report. “What we have in this report is a flicker of good news,” he said, pointing out that there are nearly 20 million fewer jobs than in February. “We’ve gone from a Category 5 hurricane to a Category 4.9 hurricane.”

Biden in his remarks initially ignored the report, starting by condemning Trump’s Friday press conference mention of George Floyd, the black Minneapolis man whose death after being held under a white police officer’s knee sparked nationwide protests and violence.

When Biden recognized the positive employment figures, he criticized Trump for celebrating too early.

“I’m truly glad to see that two-and-a-half million Americans got their jobs back,” Biden said. “I was disturbed, however, to see the president crowing this morning, basically hanging a ‘mission accomplished’ banner out there.”

Biden noted that not every group saw an uptick. The black unemployment rate increased by 0.1%. But he fumbled, incorrectly saying that Hispanic unemployment also increased ⁠— a line that was not present in the prepared remarks later distributed to the press. The Hispanic unemployment dropped from 18.9% to 17.6%.

Jason Furman, former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, warned Democrats in early April that economic data could give Trump good reason to brag about economic statistics just before November.

“We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country,” Furman said during the April digital presentation, referring then to the months just before Election Day.

He declined to make political predictions on the impact of Friday’s job numbers.

“Two things are true: the economy improved a lot in May relative to April, and the economy was terrible in May,” Furman told the Washington Examiner in an email on Friday. “The right question for voters to ask is, ‘Who would do a better job going forward’?”

Austan Goolsbee, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and former economic adviser to Obama, disputed a suggestion that Republican states beginning reopenings explained the favorable numbers.

“The shutdown orders had a very small, incremental effect on the unemployment rate for the economies,” he said on the DNC press call. “The shutdowns of the economy began many days before those shutdown orders were in place.”

Meanwhile, Republicans are taking a victory lap and mocking Democrats for preparing to highlight a doom-and-gloom jobs report.

“This is not the jobs report Joe Biden wanted to wake up to this morning,” quipped Steve Guest, rapid response director at the Republican National Committee.

The former vice president was not the only liberal who fumbled analysis of the report.

Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman floated the idea that Trump directed the Bureau of Labor Statistics to skew the figures in his favor.

“This being the Trump era, you can’t completely discount the possibility that they’ve gotten to the BLS,” Krugman said in a tweet. He later apologized, explaining that he was trying to cover every possible reason for the surprising figures in his wider analysis.