For over a year now, the White House has not only been denying that a recession is coming but even trying to take credit for staving off a recession last year. However, on Friday, with the release of the July jobs report, fears of a recession exploded. And Kamala Harris's presidential campaign knows a recession is coming and is panicking about it.
The latest jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that the unemployment rate increased by 0.2 percentage points to 4.3%, the highest since October 2021, with 7.2 million unemployed — up from 5.9 million a year ago
The most significant takeaway from the jobs report is the three-month moving average of the national unemployment rate increased by more than 0.50 percent compared to the lowest three-month average from the past year, thus triggering the Sahm Recession Indicator. There are other recession indicators as well, but this one has proven to be the most accurate, which means that a recession in the coming months appears inevitable.
A statement attributed to Joe Biden tried to paint the devastating jobs report in the most positive light possible.
"Since Vice President Harris and I took office, our economy has created nearly 16 million jobs, average unemployment has been lower than during any administration in 50 years, and incomes have risen faster than prices," the statement read. "Today’s report shows employment is growing more gradually at a time when inflation has declined significantly. Business investment remains strong thanks in part to our investing in America agenda, which is creating good-paying jobs in communities that have been left behind. There’s more to do, but we’re making progress growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up."
However, Harris's campaign issued a much different statement. Instead of trying to find the silver lining in the dark cloud that was the jobs reports, they decided to blame Trump for the lousy jobs report.
"Donald Trump failed Americans as president, costing our economy millions of jobs, and bringing us to the brink of recession," Harris for President spokesperson James Singer said in a statement that Fox News Digital received. "Now, he’s promising even more damage with a Project 2025 agenda that will decimate the middle class and increase taxes on working families, while ripping away health care, raising prescription drug costs, and cutting Social Security and Medicare — all while making his billionaire donors richer."
Related: Welcome to the Harris-Biden Recession
Well, that's a bizarre statement, don't you think? How is it that the Harris campaign's first reaction to the jobs report is to blame Trump for "bringing us to the brink of recession" when he hasn't been in office since Jan. 20, 2021, and the Biden-Harris campaign has been touting its "historic" job creation record for nearly as long?
The answer is obvious: they know a recession is coming, and they know that a recession will destroy her campaign. Even Biden once said that John McCain "probably" would have won in 2008 had it not been for the economic collapse mere months before Election Day.
"The truth of the matter is, Barack knows it, I know, had the economy not collapsed around your ears, John ... I think you probably would have won," Biden said back in 2013.
While it's hard to say whether that's true. One thing I can tell you is that McCain had a nearly three-point lead in the RealClearPolitics average before Lehman Brothers collapsed and triggered the economic crisis. Voters tend to punish the party in power during an economic downturn, and if a full-blown recession happens, the Harris campaign knows that it has to get voters to blame it on Trump.
"Kamala Harris has proudly and repeatedly celebrated her role as Joe Biden’s co-pilot on ‘Bidenomics,’" Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. "She cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate for spending that put inflation on steroids, and despite the evidence that America’s working families are hurting she tells us these failed plans are working."
"The basic necessities of food, gas, and housing are less affordable, unemployment is rising, and Kamala doesn’t seem to care," she added.
The Harris campaign is panicking.
