On Our 2020 Election Model and the September Jobs Report

The first miss in March, with unusually large upward revisions explaining most of it. For the first time in the crisis, payrolls were consistent with our index of other contemporaneous labor market data. Trump picks up 28 electoral college votes in our quantitative model, but those and more will likely be shed as personal income data for Q3 comes out. The V-shaped recovery isn’t petering out, it is maturing as one should expect. It is K-shaped only in the sense that all recoveries are. Every recovery has winners and losers, as sectors adapt differently to the unique shocks at hand. In the present moment, the entrepreneurial and diverse leisure and retail sectors are recovering robustly, contributing 70% of September’s payroll gains. The sclerotic and monolithic education sector, on the other hand, subtracted payrolls.