That’s your takeaway, fine. But this thread is mostly about questions like whether the voters (or rather, the “important” voters) will take such data over personal experience (whatever that may be) as a key decision point if they already haven’t made up their minds.
Really? He covered the jobs report in his speech at the DNC? I thought the jobs report was released Friday but his speech was Thursday night?
FWIW, I saw as much of the DNC speeches as I saw of the RNC… zero. Much as I see no political tv ads. The benefits being an American of living abroad.
Even assuming that’s true for every year, you can clearly see that the labor force participation rate has clearly been in decline since the DotCom bubble burst in the early 2000’s. Since Obama took office, it’s clearly worsened. Sure, the trend was there before he took office, but to say “we’re headed in the right direction” is, at best, a simple misrepresentation of the truth.
What? The fundamentals have been shaken to it’s very core by deregulation. There’s no effin way you can come out of the fire without getting a long painful burn. Despite that there was a modest INCREASE in Jobs, not a jobs loss.
FDR was in power for seven years before he got the US into a war and with a big enough stimulus to get the economy moving.
The friggen conservatives wants decades of decay to get a miraculous quick fix. Ain’t going to happen.
To go back to the bullshit greedy Republican policies will surely bury the country.
Omg a Black Conservative:
As Andiethewestie noted, we are suffering through the worse economic disaster since the Great Depression, which was brought on by the very sort of deregulation philosophy and market fundamentalism that conservatives support. And, it happened in spite of massive tax cuts to the wealthy that were supposedly supposed to pave the way toward economic growth but instead led to our country’s lost decade.
So, this at least partly accounts for the low labor participation rate. However, that particular statistic also involves lots of different things and if you look at its general behavior over the long term, it may in part also reflect demographic trends like the aging of the population. It also works in somewhat counterintuitive ways too since a family having a tough time making ends meet can even drive more people (e.g., spouses that wouldn’t otherwise work) into the labor force.
It seems like you are just sort of data-mining for the one statistic that shows a trend you like rather than one you don’t like (like this or this). It is understandable though, as it is a tough time to be a conservative, when nearly all the facts and science have an anti-conservative bias.
…Yeah… I said I wasn’t going to waste my time anymore with facts and crap because it’s a waste of time, but I’m a sucker for punishment. So here goes.
Please, stop. You do realize whether or not we’re, as you say, “coming out of the fire” is readily testable, right? Luckily the BLS has all sorts of nifty graphs, so we can test whether or not we’re actually making progress (this post also goes to jshore).
1.) First, to expand on my last post, here is the labor force participation rate for every month dating back to January 2000.
Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2000 67.3 67.3 67.3 67.3 67.1 67.1 66.9 66.9 66.9 66.8 66.9 67.0
2001 67.2 67.1 67.2 66.9 66.7 66.7 66.8 66.5 66.8 66.7 66.7 66.7
2002 66.5 66.8 66.6 66.7 66.7 66.6 66.5 66.6 66.7 66.6 66.4 66.3
2003 66.4 66.4 66.3 66.4 66.4 66.5 66.2 66.1 66.1 66.1 66.1 65.9
2004 66.1 66.0 66.0 65.9 66.0 66.1 66.1 66.0 65.8 65.9 66.0 65.9
2005 65.8 65.9 65.9 66.1 66.1 66.1 66.1 66.2 66.1 66.1 66.0 66.0
2006 66.0 66.1 66.2 66.1 66.1 66.2 66.1 66.2 66.1 66.2 66.3 66.4
2007 66.4 66.3 66.2 65.9 66.0 66.0 66.0 65.8 66.0 65.8 66.0 66.0
2008 66.2 66.0 66.1 65.9 66.1 66.1 66.1 66.1 65.9 66.0 65.8 65.8
2009 65.7 65.8 65.6 65.6 65.7 65.7 65.5 65.4 65.1 65.0 65.0 64.6
2010 64.8 64.9 64.9 65.1 64.9 64.6 64.6 64.7 64.6 64.4 64.5 64.3
2011 64.2 64.2 64.2 64.2 64.2 64.1 64.0 64.1 64.1 64.1 64.0 64.0
2012 63.7 63.9 63.8 63.6 63.8 63.8 63.7 63.5
The “Great Recession” officially ended in June 2009 yet you still see a consistent downtick. Now, jshore, let’s say that labor force participation decreases when the economy is good as families can get away with one person staying at home whilst the other works. Assuming this is true, then the labor force participation rate should have decreased during the 90’s as the economy grew and increased over the last few years as the economy faced economic downturn. But the exact opposite happened. The labor force participation rate was high in the 90’s and lower in the 2000’s. Now the other argument you put forth for a lower labor force participation rate is because of an aging population. Okay, fair enough. That brings us to point two.
2.) Here is the employment-to-population ratio dating back to 2000, which measures the proportion of the country’s working-age population that is employed. As we’re only measuring those people of working age, it more-or-less takes into account an aging population.
Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
2000 64.6 64.6 64.6 64.7 64.4 64.5 64.2 64.2 64.2 64.2 64.3 64.4
2001 64.4 64.3 64.3 64.0 63.8 63.7 63.7 63.2 63.5 63.2 63.0 62.9
2002 62.7 63.0 62.8 62.7 62.9 62.7 62.7 62.7 63.0 62.7 62.5 62.4
2003 62.5 62.5 62.4 62.4 62.3 62.3 62.1 62.1 62.0 62.1 62.3 62.2
2004 62.3 62.3 62.2 62.3 62.3 62.4 62.5 62.4 62.3 62.3 62.5 62.4
2005 62.4 62.4 62.4 62.7 62.8 62.7 62.8 62.9 62.8 62.8 62.7 62.8
2006 62.9 63.0 63.1 63.0 63.1 63.1 63.0 63.1 63.1 63.3 63.3 63.4
2007 63.3 63.3 63.3 63.0 63.0 63.0 62.9 62.7 62.9 62.7 62.9 62.7
2008 62.9 62.8 62.7 62.7 62.5 62.4 62.2 62.0 61.9 61.7 61.4 61.0
2009 60.6 60.3 59.9 59.8 59.6 59.4 59.3 59.1 58.7 58.5 58.5 58.2
2010 58.5 58.5 58.5 58.7 58.7 58.5 58.5 58.5 58.5 58.3 58.2 58.3
2011 58.4 58.4 58.5 58.4 58.4 58.2 58.2 58.3 58.4 58.4 58.5 58.5
2012 58.5 58.6 58.5 58.4 58.6 58.6 58.4 58.3
Again you can still see a consistent negative downtick even after the recession officially ended. And unless you’re going to argue that the reason a greater percentage of working-age Americans are unemployed is because they are going back to school (i.e., college) or something like that, you’re going to be hard-pressed to argue any kind of economic improvement.
Now contrary to what jshore says, that’s not data mining. Those are cold-hard facts. There are fewer Americans at work post-recession than pre-recession* and the only reason the U.S. does not have an unemployment rate of near 11% is because so many people are simply not looking for jobs.
The fact that you’re trying to hang your head on “well, at least we added jobs this month!” is ridiculous as it is farcical. But I’ll get to that below.
The U.S. only added 310K jobs for the month? Big deal!
96K jobs isn’t something to crow about-- especially since most of those jobs are low-wage jobs (i.e., fast food). It’s not even enough to keep up with population growth. By my non-expert calculations, if no one dropped out of the hunt for a job in August, the unemployment rate would have been somewhere between 8.6% and 8.7%.
Highly debatable.
How about some improvement? Come on, now. Aside from the denizens of this board, most people very well realize they’re not better off than they were at the start of Obama’s presidency.
And inevitably, we always come back to “It’s the Republicans fault!”. Which, you know, is as untrue as it is farcical.
*ETA: In fact, the numbers during the recession were better than the number post recession!
This is not good. Coming just 1 day after Obama’s speech, and during a time when the “real” campaign is underway. As it is, 2012 is worse than 2011 in terms of job creation. Not the direction you want to be going if you’re seeking reelection.
Not only tedious, but the pessimism of the Repubulicans who want to go in there and apply the same crapola Bush policies, can’t deny the fact that the Stock Market is not seeing the doom and gloom. In fact, the S and P was up on Friday… didn’t they get the memo? Of course they did.
Oh oh… this optimism just doesn’t square with the Sky is Falling.
Yes, it’s not good. Obviously, the President would much rather the opposite happened. But is it significant? If so, to what extent?
I think we all realize that things aren’t going too well in the economy, and that’ll hurt the President’s reelection chances. I’m more interested in to what extent, and whether the job reports in particular will play a major role.
Not significant. The President got a fairly decent bounce out of the convention, his favorables went up to 52% and Nate Silver has projected a 78% chance of Obama taking the election. Sept. 7: Polls Find Hints of Obama Convention Bounce - The New York Times
Most of those poll numbers probably come from before the latest jobs report. It will take a few days for the air to clear but we should have a clear idea of where the election stands in a week’s time. Romney has had his convention and now he has a mediocre jobs report to work with, if he is still behind by 2-3 points in key swing states, he is in trouble.
My hunch is it won’t hurt Obama too much. The mediocre economy is already baked into the polls and that alone isn’t going to win Romney the election. Obama struck a cautious and sober tone during his convention speech, partly I suspect because he knew this jobs report was coming. That will be his pitch for the rest of the campaign: " The road is hard but we have some already made some progress. Give me four years to finish the job".
I think it will work because Romney’s message is so limited. He seems to think that attacking Obama on the economy is all it will take, but he really needs to present a credible economic vision of his own and he hasn’t done it.
Exactly.
The op is about the effect this will have on the election. Base turn-out for either side and the decision of the key undecided voters in those key states are not going to be effected by what the report states the numbers are. The reality that the numbers reflect, that some of those voters are still out of work or are supporting adult children who are out of work, that has an effect … but that effect is already priced in. (As noted by Lantern)
The only effect this will have is indirect: it will blunt the media arc. The next few days are less discussing how great the DNC was than it otherwise would have been and if the numbers had beaten expectations (which would still be reflecting a weakly recovering economy) then the media arc would have become unbearably as Team Obama would have wanted it to be. That blunted arc will have an effect, especially in this small period during which the low information voter pays some little bit of attention, but not much of one.
Not really. Low information voters aren’t no information voters. It means they are more amenable to sound bites. On the one hand, this helps with the unemployment rate, which went down to 8.1% (good). Low information voters might not dig deeper to find out why (not good). Still, I doubt there are any people who don’t have an opinion about the state of their own finances, which is a whole 'nuther thing than the state of “the economy”. And if anyone thinks the stock market being up in a down economy is a good thing for Obama, I got news for you. That only makes it look like the fat cats are doing well at the expense of the common folks. Lucky for Obama he’s running against one of those fat cats!
The report is pretty balanced as far as the reality of Friday and the jobs report. It’s still an net uptick for Obama. I totally agree his speech was was lower key, Presidential knowing the state of the economy, whereas the others had more freedom with great oratory. Obama was never the Messiah, as some wanted to paint him, he said the election was not about him in 2008, and he said it again in 2012. He’s a pragmatist, and his speech reflected that.
It’s whatever sound bite gets traction. Romney’s hoping his mantra will have resonance, and if the media choses to play that game then he might have a foothold with the undecided voter. My sense is the focus groups of undecideds at both conventions had a very different take away. The RNC group no one was moved to vote for them, whereas the DNC group had movement.
So far i have seen no indication that any of the jobs reports be they positive or negative have had any impact whatsoever in polling numbers. The state of the economy has already been factored in peoples opinions.