Jobs report fails to boost Kamala Harris as unemployment rate holds

US employers added 142,000 jobs in August, while unemployment fell slightly to 4.2 percent, the Department of Labor announced on Friday.

In July, U.S. employers added 114,000 jobs—far less than expected, especially when compared to the 2024 average of 203,000 monthly job gains.

During the same month, the unemployment rate rose to 4.3 percent—the highest level since November 2021.

While the August numbers are an improvement on the previous month, the latest report is not as positive as the Biden administration may have hoped for.

“Headline nonfarm payroll growth of 142,000 was marginally weaker than the expected change of 165,000, and the previous two months of data were also revised down by a combined 86,000. Hence, July’s already weak 114,000 print is now just 74,000,” William Blair’s macro analyst Richard de Chazal wrote in a statement shared with Newsweek.

“One of the problems with the employment report at the moment is that the recent large -818,000 revisions are only preliminary and will not be fully incorporated into the data until February’s final revisions next year,” he added. “The large overstatement leaves the market guessing just how overstated the current batch of numbers might also be: 50,000-100,000 per month?

“Today’s revisions to the past two months of payroll data only help confirm this weakness. In this case, growth is already below levels that are associated with the rate that is needed to keep the unemployment rate unchanged.”

The report was widely considered crucial for both Wall Street and Kamala Harris‘ presidential campaign.

This jobs report comes shortly before the U.S. Federal Reserve’s September 18 announcement on interest rates, which most observers expect to include a rate cut.

The Fed has been clear that it will be cutting interest rates, but it is not yet clear by how much.

Mark Hamrick, a senior economist at Bankrate, told Newsweek before the report was released: “As with the weak July reading, the Fed will not become overly focused on one month’s data… but recent softness, coupled with the recent substantial negative benchmark revisions subtracting more than 800k jobs in payrolls from April 2023 to March of this year, underscores downside risks for the economy.”

Kitty Richards, Senior Fellow at the Groundwork Collaborative and former Treasury official, said in a statement shared with Newsweek: “Today’s lower-than-expected jobs numbers confirm the trends we’ve been seeing for months: the Fed is behind the curve and must move quickly to bring interest rates down to their normal level, before this labor-market softening turns into something far worse. In 2022, the Fed pursued four consecutive 75 basis point rate hikes. There is no reason they can’t be just as aggressive in cutting rates now.”

The report is also important for Harris’ presidential campaign. The economy has proven to be among the most important issues that Americans are concerned about as they head toward the November election.

Sixty-two percent of Americans said that the economy was the most likely issue to determine how they will vote in the November presidential election, according to a recent poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies on behalf of Newsweek. The poll was conducted among 2,500 eligible voters in the U.S. on August 29.

A nearly static unemployment rate in today’s report could prove to be good news for Donald Trump, who has consistently blamed the Biden administration for the higher cost of living in the U.S. over the past four years, as well as the state of the U.S. economy.

Update, 9/6/2024 9:35 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include comments from Richard de Chazal and Kitty Richards.