Remember last month when Gallup's daily 30-day rolling average tracking poll shot up for unemployment. Hitting a (recent) high of 9.1% on 3/3 and 3/7. Remember how this was used as justification for the right-wing conspiracy theory that the BLS was somehow cooking the numbers. What BLS's motivation for doing this was never precisely clear to me. It supposedly had something to do with the election, but it always struck that if that were the case they jumped the gun by starting so far in advance of the election. The scheme was bound to fall apart before election day.
Regardless, people have never needed rational explanations for conspiracy theories. After all, if they had rational explanations they would just be theories. The more rational among us pointed out that Gallup's numbers weren't seasonally adjusted and had other slight differences that caused them to not quite track with official numbers in the past. They pointed out that one needed to look at the economy wholistically and not focus overly on any one data point, and little other data supported the idea of a weakening economy.
But then a funny thing happened. Since 3/7, in less than 3 weeks, Gallup's unemployment number has steadily trended downward until today it sits at 8.5% and will likely continue its trend downward in the coming days. So is an economy as large as the USA's really that volatile for in the space of 2.5 months the unemployment rate to shoot up 0.8% only to subsequently come right back down almost to where it started? Unlikely, more likely it just proves that the BLS's work to seasonally adjust the numbers is actually very valuable and is in no way cooking the books.
So now only one question remains. What will be the new proof that will be trotted out to justify the conspiracy theories?