WASHINGTON, D.C.: US voters and the two presidential candidates get a last snapshot of the economy on Friday before the November 6 election, with the October jobs report a report card on President Barack Obama’s policies.

Obama is fighting for re-election against Republican rival Mitt Romney in a dead-heat race and the hobbling economy and high unemployment are Americans’ top concerns.

Romney has assailed Obama’s economic leadership, saying despite massive stimulus programs 23 million people are still struggling to find work.

Obama fires back that after losing nine million jobs in the Great Recession, businesses have created more than five million jobs in the past two and a half years.

Friday’s report is unlikely to tip the argument one way or the other.

Most analysts expect the jobless rate will have ticked a tenth of a point higher to 7.9 percent, even as the country added 125,000 net new jobs during the month, improving from 114,000 in September.

That will leave the number of officially unemployed still above 12 million—a hard fact that has dogged Obama’s effort to convince voters to re-elect him.

The world’s largest economy has been limping along this year, with gross domestic product growth picking up only slightly to a 2 percent rate in the third quarter, well below what economists say is needed for jobs growth.

When Obama took office, however, the economy was shrinking, contracting 5.3 percent in the first quarter of 2009 and shedding an average of 780,000 jobs per month.

The economy began adding jobs 14 months later, but in the three months to September 2012, the average gain was barely 146,000 a month.

In September, the jobless rate slipped to 7.8 percent, exactly where it stood when Obama became president. In October 2009 it had peaked at 10 percent, and for the first eight months of 2012 it had hovered above 8 percent.

Behind the headline-grabbing improved jobless number, the September jobs data revealed the persistent problems in the labor market more than three years after the economy exited the recession.