A surprisingly good jobs report on Friday has sharpened questions about what kind of influence the economy will have on the 2020 presidential election.
The official unemployment rate for May was 13.3 percent, down from 14.7 percent the previous month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced. The new figure is much better than expectations yet still much worse than the nadir of the Great Recession more than a decade ago.
The complicated dynamic poses challenges both for President Trump and for his presumptive Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden.
Trump has already begun celebrating the job numbers. But, in doing so, he could end up sounding a note that appears too euphoric, and therefore out of step with the millions of Americans who have been thrown into unemployment in recent months.
The reverse is true for Biden. He argued Friday that missteps by Trump in handling the coronavirus crisis have deepened its economic impact — and that the president is prematurely declaring victory. But if he goes too far in that direction, Biden leaves himself open to the charge that he is talking down a recovery — or even rooting for continued economic suffering as a tool that would help lever Trump out of the White House in November.
Even some Democrats are expressing concern about whether their party’s response to the unexpected economic news will strike the right tone.
Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic strategist in New York, argued that Democrats would be better advised to make the argument that they had helped put the nation on the road to recovery than simply “attacking Trump head-on.”
The latter option “looks partisan, and it goes back to his argument” that Democrats have acted in an obstructionist way, Sheinkopf said.
By contrast, a focus on the Democratic push for legislation to ameliorate the worst impacts of the crisis would be far more effective, he argued.
“The message needs to be: ‘We passed the stimulus bill to get people working again. It was the right thing to do, and we should have done more, which would have brought the unemployment number down even more. But we had to work against [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell and Trump to get that done.’” Sheinkopf said.
Trump, meanwhile, is making every effort to take advantage of the jobs surprise — especially coming off a period when his approval ratings have slipped, he has fallen behind Biden in head-to-head polls and the nation has been roiled by protests following the killing of George Floyd.
Trump noted on Friday that some experts had predicted unemployment could rise as high as 20 percent in May.
After a flurry of celebratory tweets, Trump also held an event in the White House Rose Garden on short notice. There he asserted that it was only a matter of time before “we will go back to having the greatest economy anywhere in the world — nothing close.”
Trump also suggested that the speed of the recovery could be even better than the rosiest previous predictions.
The president alluded to the hope that there could be a quick bounce-back, often termed a “V-shaped recovery.”
“This is better than a V, this is a rocket ship,” Trump insisted.
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