Jobs Report Brings Unexpected Good News for Obama Instead, Mr. Obama - and the economy - received some unexpected good news. Economists will spend the rest of the day parsing the numbers and arguing over exactly the best way to describe the report, but there is little question about its overall thrust: positive. The unemployment rate dropped sharply, to 7.8 percent from 8.1 percent, because the Labor Department's survey of households showed a large gain in the number of employed people in September. The survey of businesses showed a smaller gain, but the survey also showed that hiring gains in July and August were larger than expected. In a note to clients, Jim O'Sullivan, the chief United States economist at High Frequency Economics, a research firm, called it "a much stronger report than expected." At this point in the presidential race, any single unemployment report is unlikely to have a major effect on the campaign. Friday's report does not change the basic story line about the economy: it remains weak, and it continues to grow at a modest pace. The recovery from the financial crisis continues, but it will take a long time before the economy feels healthy. For Mr. Obama, however, a fundamental change in the contours of the race is not the goal. Polls have consistently shown him with a small lead. The worry among his campaign advisers is that Mitt Romney's strong performance in Wednesday's debate and Mr. Obama's weak one have the potential to be a watershed. That concern no doubt remains, but it would have been all the stronger if the jobs report had been weaker. A standard part of Mr. Romney's stump speech was the fact that the unemployment rate remained above 8 percent. Friday's report changes that, causing the rate to fall to its lowest level since January 2009, shortly before Mr. Obama took office. The report covers the middle of each month, before a new president is inaugurated on Jan. 20. The share of Americans who are employed remains lower than when Mr. Obama took office, and Mr. Romney noted in a statement on Friday that the unemployment rate has fallen in part because of "all the people who have simply dropped out of the labor force." Were they counted, he said, the jobless rate would have been closer to 11 percent. "This is not what a real recovery looks like," Mr. Romney said. In a blog post, Alan Krueger, a top White House economist, wrote, "While there is more work that remains to be done, today's employment report provides further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to heal from the wounds inflicted by the worst downturn since the Great Depression." For all the numbers in the report, the simple summary is that more people had jobs last month than economists expected. The Labor Department's monthly survey of households showed a net gain of 873,000 jobs, a huge number that almost certainly reflects some statistical noise. That gain was the main reason for the sharp drop in the unemployment rate. Of the gain, 582,000 of the jobs were part time, leaving a net increase of 291,000. The monthly survey of businesses showed a gain of only 114,000 jobs, which in the broad range of the number needed merely to keep up with population growth. But each monthly jobs report also updates the numbers from the previous two months, as the Labor Department economists receive more detailed information. This month, that information showed that the economy gained 86,000 more jobs in July and August than previously thought, showing that the August report was stronger than initially believed. Combining the revisions with the September numbers, the new jobs report effectively shows a gain of 200,000 jobs in the business survey. In both the household survey and business survey, that is, the overall gain in full-time jobs was stronger than expected. In the last 12 months, the economy has gained an average of 150,000 jobs a month. It gained an average of 85,000 in 2010, and in 2009, it lost an average of 422,000. At the current pace of hiring, the economy remains years away from an unemployment rate that economists consider healthy. Mr. Obama has emphasized that the economy is moving in the right direction after a severe financial crisis, while Mr. Romney has emphasized that it has improved more slowly than many voters hoped or than Mr. Obama predicted. The surprisingly strong report led to suggestions from some Republicans on Friday morning that Labor Department economists were manipulating the numbers for Mr. Obama's benefit. On Twitter, Jack Welch, a Romney supporter and the former chief executive of General Electric, wrote: "Unbelievable jobs numbers ... these Chicago guys will do anything ... can't debate so change numbers." Many economists of both parties believe such accusations are false. The Labor Department economists who compile the jobs report are not political appointees. "Most economic data are nonsense" from month to month, Ian Shepherdson, an independent economist, wrote on Twitter, meaning that they contain a large amount of statistical noise. But that does not mean it is rigged. We aren't talking about Soviet tractor output here. Mark Landler contributed reporting.