> that comes with a couple of big, big caveats...

Which have been dusted off again now that a Republican is in office.

> Those numbers by definition don't include job-seekers who have left the market and quit being job-seekers. IOW, people who became so despondent that they gave up.

There's a large pool of people who gave up searching for jobs, and that happened under Obama. It was years of feeling helpless that swung so many Democrats in the rust belt to vote for Trump. Obama's policies greatly benefited coastal areas, DC was a boom town the entire time for instance, while simply ignoring large swaths of the country.