I think public opinion, which is currently sour on the direction of the country and thus on the Democrats as well, isn’t mostly driven by jobs numbers or other government statistics. It’s more fundamentally driven by lived experience. And a lot sucks right now, even though there’s been a lot of positive economic news. Having said that, there’s really no question the consistently flawed jobs tabulations have hurt Joe Biden significantly. Again and again we’ve found out that a slackening recovery was actually a series of counting errors. The reports are “revised” later. But those revisions, in the nature of things, don’t get a fraction of the attention that the monthly reports do. I’m basically certain there’s no funny business going on. At least in broad outlines the cause seems pretty clear: the chaos of the pandemic has at least temporarily broken our system of tabulating jobs numbers.
Journalists have taken way too long to absorb this fact.
