The September jobs report confirmed that the economic recovery has picked up, and the U.S. economy is now growing pretty strongly. The survey showed that firms created 248,000 jobs in September, and that the unemployment rate fell to 5.9 per cent—the first time it has dipped below six per cent since 2008. That’s good news for almost everybody. But why isn’t it having more of an impact on the political scene? With the midterms just weeks away, Democrats remain on the defensive.

This isn’t the first impressive jobs number we’ve had; far from it. Setting aside the August figures, which have just been revised upward, there have been a series of strong reports. In the past six months, employers have added about 245,000 jobs a month. Since the start of 2014, they have created nearly two million jobs.

And the record of job growth goes back a good deal further than the start of this year. Since February, 2010, the economy has created 9.8 million jobs. That’s right: close to ten million new jobs. And if you ignore the government, which has been cutting its payrolls, the figure is well more than ten million.

Ten million new jobs created in less than five years. Call me naïve, but that sounds like a pretty good campaign slogan. Why isn’t it working? Strike that. Why aren’t Democrats even using it?

The employment gains did follow a deep slump, during which close to nine million jobs were lost. But that’s why we call it a “recovery.” It refers to a period of time during which the economy is recuperating from a nasty shock—in this case, a very nasty shock, the worst downturn since the Great Depression. We had a deep recession, and now we’ve had a prolonged recovery, which is still gaining in strength. Maybe that’s a cause for relief rather than for outright celebration. Surely, though, it should be having some impact on the political situation.

In his first two years in office, Ronald Reagan endured a crunching recession, during which the unemployment rate reached almost eleven per cent. But all we hear about these days is “the Reagan recovery.” Why don’t people talk about “the Obama recovery”?

I’ve been looking at some historical data, and one answer is that job growth rebounded more strongly under Reagan than it has under Obama. In the five years from the end of 1982 to the end of 1987, the economy created almost fifteen million jobs, which is obviously quite a bit more than ten million. However, I’m not sure that’s the defining difference between then and now. Although the economy created a lot of jobs in the nineteen-eighties, the labor force was also growing rapidly, and, amid widespread fears of deindustrialization, unemployment remained stubbornly high. It isn’t widely appreciated, but at this point in Reagan’s second term the jobless rate was substantially higher than it is today: seven per cent compared to 5.9 per cent. And it stayed above six per cent for almost another year.

The more important factor, I suspect, is one which President Obama referred to in a speech at Northwestern University on Thursday: weak—and, in some cases, negative—growth in wages and income. Friday’s jobs report confirmed that wages are barely keeping up with inflation. According to the latest data from the Census Bureau, the income of the typical (median) American household in 2013 was about forty-five hundred dollars below the typical income in 2007. “It’s still harder than it should be to pay the bills and to put away some money,” Obama said. “Even when you’re working your tail off, it’s harder than it should be to get ahead.”

Last month, in a post about the new census figures, I argued that the stagnation in wages is the defining fact about modern American politics. But it’s also a phenomenon that goes back a long way—to the Reagan years and beyond. Between 1969 and 1980, the median household income barely grew at all. (In inflation-adjusted 2013 dollars, it went from $47,124 to $47,668.) After the steadily rising living standards of the postwar decades, this stagnation came as a big shock to Americans, and it helps to explain the political backlash that Reagan rode to power. For the first two years of his Presidency, the economy was in recession and the median household income actually fell. But from then on, it started to grow. Between 1983 and 1988, when his second term ended, it went from $46,425 to $51,514—an increase of about eleven per cent.

Rising incomes are what really distinguished the Reagan recovery from the Obama recovery, and that, I suspect, is why the two Presidents enjoyed such different political fortunes. (According to Gallup, Reagan’s average approval rating during his second term was 55.3 per cent. That’s about ten points higher than what Obama has averaged so far in his second term.)

This suggests that the answer to the question at the top of this post is a somewhat discouraging one for Democrats. At some point, one would hope, Americans will give President Obama and his party (and the Federal Reserve) at least a bit of credit for digging the economy out of a deep ditch and getting it back on the road. In the past five years, the U.S. economy has substantially outperformed most other advanced economies. Now that the unemployment rate has dipped back into the fives, maybe—just maybe—public perceptions will change. But until the recovery feeds into higher wages and rising living standards for ordinary Americans, the political payoff is likely to be limited.