818,000 jobs correction may not worry economists. It’s a problem for Kamala Harris

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The federal government routinely revises economic data, but it rarely makes a correction as large as it did on Wednesday, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported America’s economy created 818,000 fewer jobs than it initially thought over the past year.

The new data comes at a politically consequential moment, as Vice President Kamala Harris tries to ride momentum as Democrats’ new presidential nominee and rewire voters’ perceptions of the Biden administration’seconomy.

The White House, and Harris along with it, has struggled to figure out how to convince Americans that despite a widespread and consistent public unease about the US economy, things are actually going quite well and that inflation has been tamed without substantiallyruining the labor market.

Joe Biden boasted at the Democratic National Convention Monday night that he had helped create 16 million new jobs as president, rounding up from 15.8 million. He could no longer say that after Wednesday’s BLS report.

Still, creating 15 million new jobs is not nothing – far more than the nearly 7 million jobs created during Donald Trump’s administration after stripping out pandemic-related job losses.

Democrats have found momentum in the presidential race with Harris stepping in for Biden. In an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released on Sunday, she led Trump nationwide among registered voters.

But Trump has a 9-point advantage on the two issues most cited by Americans in that poll as the most important – the economy and inflation.

In Gallup polling from July, less than a quarter of Americans had rated the US economy as good