Trump’s Midnight Rants Face Rude Awakening: Stunning New Jobs Report

As the clock crept toward midnight on Thursday evening, Donald Trump unleashed two all-caps social media missives that neatly captured the sophistication of his arguments on the economy. One vomited forth a bunch of scattershot promises to end taxes on untold numbers of people while falsely pushing the idea that Trump delivered the largest tax cut in U.S. history. The other raged that Kamala Harris will end “FRACKING,” featuring a video depicting her as a radical socialist who will destroy American energy production, and concluding: “Only President Trump will bring back Trump’s strong economy.”

In a case of spectacular bad timing, only eight hours later, we learned that in September, the economy added a stunning 254,000 new jobs, far surpassing expectations.

This is the last jobs report before the early voting really gets underway. While there will be one more on Friday, November 1, it will come too late to have any real political effect. By contrast, the surprising nature of today’s report will prompt many days of positive headlines about jobs—including from local news outlets, which independents tend to read—that will keep on mitigating Harris’s leading vulnerability against Trump: economic approval numbers.

I’m not sure people appreciate the magnitude of one of Harris’s biggest achievements in this campaign: fighting Trump to a near-draw on the economy. There is a telling number buried in a new Cook Political Report poll of the seven key battleground states: Harris is now dead even with Trump on which candidate likely voters trust on “getting inflation under control.” In August, Cook’s polling found Trump leading by six points on this question; now each candidate has 47 percent.

To be sure, Harris is not yet where she needs to be on the economy overall against Trump. The Cook poll—which also finds Harris with slight leads in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada, a tie in North Carolina, and Trump ahead in Georgia—finds Trump ahead of Harris by 50–45 percent on who is trusted to handle the economy overall. And other polls find Trump with an advantage on that same question.

But Trump’s edge on that overall metric has been steadily shrinking in many polls. And the Cook poll’s finding that Harris has reached parity on inflation in particular is important: It suggests Harris’s messaging is working. Harris has poured immense resources into highlighting the aspects of her economic agenda that are focused on affordability: Her campaign has spent $35 million broadcasting just three ads about her policies to curb costs on a variety of fronts, ads that have run over 50,000 times.

What’s more, there are signs that Harris is achieving some separation from President Biden’s unpopularity. The Cook poll finds that in those battleground states, Harris’s job approval as vice president is 51–49 percent, whereas Biden is 11 points underwater.

Impressions of Biden’s age-related feebleness fed a sense that he couldn’t control inflation, driving his numbers down further, which in turn made him seem even less in control, in a kind of political death spiral. By contrast, Harris may have broken out of that doom loop, in part through the sheer energy of her performance. The media focus on Harris has lifted her approval, which in turn has probably led voters to be open to appreciating actual economic conditions—in which both inflation and joblessness are low.

The September jobs report will be helpful here as well: It finds that not only did job creation wildly beat expectations, unemployment is down again to 4.1 percent and wage gains are strong and outpacing inflation. The Harris campaign highlighted this clip to illustrate the gushing tone of the coverage:

If I’m right that voters are now more open to hearing the facts about actual economic conditions, this jobs report could matter more than it otherwise might have.

Beyond all this, Harris’s performance may also be helping mitigate any effect in which voters see her as tainted by their disapproval of Biden. Never Trump strategist Sarah Longwell sees this happening in her focus groups of undecided and swing voters, noting that they show these voters really registered Harris’s debate comment that “you’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me.”

“Her current economic proposals give voters something forward-looking to evaluate,” Longwell tells me about what her focus groups are showing. “They have a persistent negative view of Biden’s economy. But you’ll now hear some voters saying Harris’s policies will be more helpful to their families than Trump’s.”

Finally, Harris may be benefiting from a dynamic that often eludes pundits. Our political debates about the economy are often straitjacketed—they revolve solely around the single metric of trust or approval on “the economy,” which treats voter impressions as if they only turn on appreciation of each candidate’s technical economic know-how. But that’s a vast oversimplification. Another metric that matters here is voters’ impressions of which candidate cares about their needs and problems—that is, which candidate they believe is on their side. And here Harris retains an advantage.

In this sense, the current campaign carries faint echoes of another campaign it is rarely compared to: the 2012 presidential race. Because it is apparently a fact of our political life that Democratic presidents clean up disastrous GOP messes and are often judged harshly on their inability to achieve this immediately, Barack Obama in 2012 also faced stubbornly low economic approval numbers as the country ground its way back from the Great Recession.

At the time, pundits robotically cited Mitt Romney’s superior economic numbers as proof Obama was doomed. But Obama advisers believed economic disapproval of him largely registered dissatisfaction with the status quo and that the “Who’s on your side?” comparison would ultimately enable Obama to neutralize Romney on the issue. And they were right. The comparison between 2012 and 2024 is admittedly imperfect, but in one narrow sense it may prove apt: Then, as now, technical economic approval numbers may not be determinative after all.

Trump could still win this race, as it remains very close. The sort of undecided, low-propensity voter who is still out there does remember Trump’s economy fondly and doesn’t hold him accountable for the Covid-fueled economic catastrophe of his last year. Perversely, this remains a big reason for persistent voter sourness on the economy right now. All of that unquestionably remains a major hurdle for Harris.

But if she can persuade remaining swing voters that the Harris economy of the future is not the Biden economy of the present—or, at least, the one that many voters perceive—and that it is superior to, well, whatever it is Trump is telling us he’ll do, then she can win. The new jobs report suggests the pieces are falling into place for her to do just that.