Midterm elections often end up serving as a referendum on the president’s performance. Given this, I’ve been surprised not to hear Democrats more aggressively trumpeting the improving economy. After all, the unemployment rate has fallen by two percentage points since the last election, and at 5.9 percentage points it is far lower than many had foreseen two years ago.

The decline in unemployment is also the largest ever registered by this point in a midterm election cycle, since the Labor Department started keeping records in 1948.