With only four days to go before Election Day, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris got an unfavorable non-farm payrolls report, which shows that job creation stalled as a likely consequence of the untimely combination of Hurricanes Helene and Milton and the Boeing’s machinists’ strike.
Payroll employment remained essentially unchanged in October, with employers adding just 12,000 positions, far below the average forecast of 100,000 in a poll of economists by Bloomberg. The unemployment rate staying flat at 4.1 percent, according to the report published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday morning.
The economy has consistently been the most important issue in this election cycle. According to polling conducted exclusively by Redfield & Wilton Strategies in October on behalf of Newsweek, 51 percent of voters think the economy is heading in the wrong direction, while 30 percent believe it is going in the right direction.
The jobs report is considered a clear snapshot of the country’s economic performance. In the case of October’s report, experts expected the impact of the hurricanes and the Boeing strike to temporarily bring down payroll employment from the revised September figure of 223,000.
However, some think that the pace of job growth