Trump and his supporters have repeatedly attacked the Biden-Harris administration for rising inflation that peaked two years ago before steadily cooling. Despite healthy job growth, few layoffs and low unemployment, Trump also charged that the United States is a “failing nation” and promised that his plan to implement high tariffs on all imported goods would restore millions of manufacturing jobs.

Monthly jobs data usually helps clarify how the economy is doing. But economists estimate that hurricanes Helene and Milton, combined with the effects of the ongoing Boeing strike, will have reduced employment last month by a significant number – about 60,000 to 100,000 jobs, most of them only temporary.

In all, economists had expected Friday’s report to show just 120,000 jobs added in October, according to data provider FactSet. That’s a decent number, though less than half of September’s unexpectedly robust gain of 254,000. The unemployment rate is expected to remain at a low 4.1%.

Once the impact of hurricanes and strikes are taken into account, those numbers would still point to a solid labor market, one that has shown surprising resilience, supported by healthy consumer spending, in the face of high Fed interest rates.

“This is a really incredibly resilient economy,” said Jane Oates, a former Labor Department official during the Obama administration. “People are spending. That’s what keeps this economy going.”

However, there may be other effects that are harder for the government to measure. The Labor Department, for example, said it believed the Boeing strike, along with a smaller walkout by some hotel workers, reduced job growth by 41,000 in October. But some of Boeing’s suppliers may also have lost jobs as the strike reduced their sales. It’s unclear how much of an impact these job losses might have had on October’s employment numbers.

At the same time, the hurricane may have cost fewer jobs than economists expect. A worker would have to miss wages for an entire pay period — often two weeks — to count as job loss in government data. Although many workers in North Carolina were out of work for so long, it’s not clear that in Florida, which has had more experience with hurricanes, employees would have missed as much work, Oates said.

Economists at UBS noted that Orlando’s major theme parks — Walt Disney World, Sea World and Universal — were closed just two days after Hurricane Milton hit. And in some states, people will be employed as part of cleanup and rebuilding efforts.

Friday’s jobs report will be the last major snapshot of the economy before the Fed’s next meeting on Nov. 7, two days after the election. Most economists expect the Fed to cut its benchmark rate by a quarter of a point, following a half-point cut in September.

If the jobs report suggests that employment remained healthy in October, excluding the effects of hurricanes and the strike, Republican political figures may again question its credibility. Last month, when the government reported that hiring unexpectedly rose in September, Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, unfoundedly charged that the report was “bogus.”

However, no mainstream economists share such skepticism. Other indicators, such as the number of people filing for unemployment benefits, data compiled mainly by states, also point to a still-strong labor market.

“I was appalled at the degree to which politicians made this argument,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. The Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles the jobs report, “is the most transparent government agency on the planet,” she said.

Trump and other critics have seized on the revisions that are often made to the government’s original estimates as evidence for their false claim that the Biden-Harris administration manipulated the data. In August, the BLS said it expected to cut its estimate of total U.S. jobs from last March by 818,000, or about 0.5 percent of the total. During the presidential debate in September, Trump said the revision reflected “fraud” in employment data. However, under its own administration, the revised BLS job count is down 514,000 in 2019.

Erica Groshen, a senior economic adviser at Cornell University and a former commissioner of the BLS, explained that such revisions “are not an error; are a feature” of government data collection.

“BLS wants to get as much information as possible in a timely manner, but it also wants the information to be as accurate as possible,” Groshen said.

The way it does this is to release early data, based on surveys of tens of thousands of companies. Later, revisions are made based on lagged data from several companies and actual job numbers derived from unemployment agencies.

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, has often tried to undermine the positive employment data, arguing that all the jobs created in the past year were immigrants.

That claim is based on the fact that the number of “foreign-born” people with jobs, as they are referred to, rose by 1.2 million in September from a year earlier, while the number of native-born workers with jobs of work fell by about 800,000.

However, the “foreign-born” category includes people who have been in the United States for years, including since childhood, and who are now citizens, as well as recent immigrants, both authorized and unauthorized.

More significantly, Native Americans retired in droves, one of the reasons so many employers often had difficulty filling jobs. As the massive baby boom generation ages, the proportion of Americans age 65 and older has grown to 17.3 percent, up from just 13.1 percent in 2010, according to Census Bureau data.

And the unemployment rate for native-born Americans, at 3.8 percent, is actually lower than the unemployment rate for foreign-born workers, at 4.2 percent.