Kamala Harris was probably not thrilled about the October jobs report. But at least it disproves one of the conspiracy theories Republicans have been trying to sell their voters.
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Donald Trump and his supporters love conspiracy theories so much that just about everything can be turned into one. It’s much more convenient that way for MAGA leaders and their reality-averse, low-information voters who are either unwilling or unable to understand basic facts of life.
For example, it is simpler for them to believe that it is “election interference” when four different grand juries indict Trump for a wide range of crimes, rather than to acknowledge that their leader is probably a crook.
This brings us to Friday’s jobs report, which was the last before an election that is probably the most consequential in anybody’s lifetime… perhaps with the exception of Jonathan, the 190-year-old giant tortoise that was around for the Civil War.
The economy has been doing pretty well in recent months on multiple fronts: Inflation is down, the gross domestic product is up, the stock market is setting records weekly, and the jobs reports have generally beat expectations.
Not this one.
In part due to massive natural disasters ravaging the southeastern United States, as well as some large strikes, the economy added a mere 12,000 jobs in October, which lagged behind expectations and some stellar jobs reports in previous months.
In the past, Republicans either ignored the performance of the labor market or hinted that some sort of conspiracy was going on.
After all, it didn’t fit into their narrative (and the one they sold their voters) that the US economy was doing really well and outperforming its peer countries consistently.
By the way, this assault on truth and reality is one of the reasons why Americans are so ignorant of basic facts about the economy… and why GOP candidates are competitive at all in this election.
If they (and the right-wing propaganda machine) hadn’t maligned the economy at every turn, and if voters were aware of reality, the contest probably would not be this close.
In any case, Republicans claimed that the great jobs figures were probably made up. That conspiracy theory picked up speed when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced in August that the economy had added 818,000 fewer jobs than previously estimated in 2023 and 2024.
Clearly, the GOP reasoned, this was evidence of the conspiracy they had suspected all along.
One of the champions of this theory is once-serious Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who has turned into a MAGA stooge in the hopes of one day becoming president.
Last month, following an outstanding jobs report, Rubio suggested that it was all a fake (a favorite right-wing strategy when facts are just too inconvenient) and that the revision exposed this nefarious plot.
The senator was at it again on Friday, I-told-you-so-ing on social media after BLS revised the figures from the previous two months downwards again (mind you, even with those revisions, the jobs records of the Biden administration has been very strong).
https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1852365674322301042
The problem is that Rubio is making it all up.
As we pointed out last month, William Beach, who was appointed by Trump to run BLS, had said that there is “no way [these numbers] can be faked” because the monthly jobs report is based on preliminary data that is later revised when more precise information becomes available.
Beach also noted that people who hint at conspiracies “don’t know enough about how the revisions work.”
As a US senator, Rubio presumably would be able to educate himself and either chose not to… or he actually did, but thought it would be easier to lie to the American people.
Of course, realizing that this is not some kind of conspiracy does not require fact-checking at all but just some common sense.
If all of these job reports (or the FBI crime figures that were recently adjusted upwards) were made up, why would the Biden administration make these revisions public right before the election?
And why, after putting out “fake” job reports for months, would BLS then issue one that is as poor as Friday’s four days before most US voters head to the polls?
People like Rubio never have a response to that… because there isn’t one. They just have to hope that their supporters never ask themselves these questions.
Otherwise, they might just come to the conclusion that they have been lied to.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
