Jae C. Hong/Associated Press Job seekers have their resumes reviewed at a job fair in Anaheim, Calif. It is increasingly apparent what the economy will look like when President Obama faces voters in November: pretty much what it looks like today. And that picture, a report from the Labor Department made clear on Friday, is far from the booming job growth that prevailed only a few months ago. In June, the economy added a meager 80,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate remained at 8.2 percent. Early this year, optimists buzzed that the jobless rate might touch below 8 percent by the election, a milestone that would be a major symbolic victory for the incumbent. Then employment growth slowed in March and took a turn toward the paltry in April and May. With Friday's report, what looked like a blip has now become a streak. And with a gridlocked Congress unlikely to pass any additional stimulus measures before the election, the president is stuck again with an economy in stall mode. June's job growth, after a revised increase of 77,000 in May, was just about enough to keep up with population growth, but not nearly enough to reduce the backlog of 13 million unemployed workers. Economists have scaled back their expectations for the rest of the year and are now forecasting continued sluggishness. "This economy has no forward momentum and little help from monetary or fiscal policy," said Kathy Bostjancic, director of macroeconomic analysis for the Conference Board. Friday's report also put a chill on financial markets, sending stocks sharply lower on both sides of the Atlantic. At a campaign stop in Poland, Ohio, on Friday, Mr. Obama urged voters to take the long view, and to be mindful of the economic state he inherited. "I want to get back to a time when middle-class families and those working to get into the middle class have some basic security," he said. Mr. Romney, on the other hand, emphasized the more recent string of weak job growth that has taken place under Mr. Obama's leadership. "This is a time for Americans to choose whether they want more of the same," Mr. Romney said from Wolfeboro, N.H., where he is vacationing. The recent string of weak employment growth may work to political advantage for Mr. Romney. From December through February, private companies added an average of 252,000 workers a month. But job growth slowed in March, leading some economists to wonder whether the unseasonably warm winter, rather than a fundamentally healthier economy, had been the real source of the short-lived employment surge. The numbers themselves are also adjusted by season, and these adjustments themselves can be imprecise and open to interpretation. By June, in any case, the payback from the unusually warm winter should have faded, indicating that the slowdown may reflect more serious underlying problems in the economy, Mr. O'Sullivan said. One of the few industries with decent job growth was temporary help services, suggesting that employers were not confident enough of the recovery's sustainability to invest in permanent hires even if their order books were currently growing. Among the few bright spots in Friday's report were ticks upward in average hourly earnings (to $23.50, from $23.44 in May) and the length of the typical private sector workweek (34.5 hours, from 34.4). Still, the overall weakness in the report may have nudged Federal Reserve officials toward additional monetary stimulus. "The odds of QE3 happening before the election are clearly going up," said Jay Feldman, an economist at Credit Suisse, referring to the nickname for a third round of stimulus known as quantitative easing. The Fed has been reluctant to inject more money partly because it has been hard to determine whether additional monetary stimulus is either effective or even needed. Mark Landler and Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.