Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

As we wait for the networks to call Pennsylvania, the world is continuing to spin, and that includes the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which just released the jobs report for October. We won’t be doing a full writeup of the report the way we usually do because, well, there’s some other stuff going on, but the numbers are important because they’re a signal of the overall health of the economy at this pivotal moment, so here’s a quick summary:

• There were 638,000 more people employed in October than in September.
• The unemployment rate fell to 6.9 percent, down from 7.9 percent in September. But there are still big racial gaps in the unemployment rate. The unemployment rate is 10.8 percent for Black workers, 8.8 percent for Hispanic workers, 7.6 percent for Asian workers and 6.0 percent for white workers.
• Overall, the report looks pretty good — the labor force participation rate increased a bit, and the number of people on temporary layoff fell by 1.4 million, although the number of permanent job losers stayed basically the same. (These are important numbers to watch because it’s much harder for people who have lost their jobs permanently to return to work, for fairly obvious reasons.) In fact, the headline jobs number was actually undercut a bit by the loss of 147,000 temporary Census jobs.

But, of course, one of the big questions once we know the winner of the presidential race (at this point, it’s looking good for Biden) is how that person will tackle the ailing economy — because a 6.9 percent unemployment rate only looks good if you’re comparing it with where it was back in April.