The economy added 29,000 jobs in September. Economists had expected 85,000.

The unemployment rate rose to 4.2 percent, against an expectation that it would hold at 4.1. The Labor Department released the figures Friday, a month out from the midterms.

The headline number is weak and nobody is arguing otherwise. What is being argued is what produced it.

Start with where the jobs went. Private employers added 46,000 while government payrolls shrank by 17,000, which means the private economy did better than the top-line figure suggests and the public sector pulled it down.

Goods-producing industries added 18,000. Durable goods manufacturing accounted for 8,000 of that and construction for 11,000. Services added 28,000.

Then there is the unemployment rate, which did something counterintuitive. It rose for a reason that is not bad news.

The labor force expanded by 485,000 people in September. Participation rose two tenths of a point.

That distinction matters because the rate counts people who want work and do not have it yet. A rate climbing because half a million people started looking is a different event from a rate climbing because people were let go.

The revisions were the genuinely bad news. July was rewritten from a gain of 21,000 to a loss of 10,000, and August came down from 162,000 to 133,000.

Two months that looked like growth now read as a stall and a slowdown. The Daily Caller noted the pattern of earlier gains being revised down after the fact.

The administration’s reading rests on labor supply. Breitbart argued the labor market has shifted away from depending on an immigration-driven workforce, and that figures which look anemic against recent years may in fact indicate healthy growth.

The logic is straightforward. If the working-age population is growing more slowly because the border is closed, the number of jobs needed each month to hold unemployment steady is lower than it used to be.

By that math, 29,000 jobs against a smaller pool is not the same event as 29,000 against a pool swelling by a million a year.

The Washington Examiner made a similar point about the internals being stronger than the headline.

Democrats are not litigating the labor-supply question at all. They are running on the number itself and on prices, which is the simpler argument and the one that fits on a mailer.

Just the News and the Washington Times both reported the release.

The next jobs report comes after the election.