Washington — The U.S. labor market continues to show signs of gradual strengthening, with newly released government data showing the economy added 161,000 jobs last month. Annual wage growth surged to levels not seen since the financial crisis, while the unemployment rate dipped to 4.9 percent in October from 5 percent the previous month.

While monthly job gains for October were slightly below forecasts — economists surveyed by Bloomberg News had expected U.S. employers to add 173,000 positions last month — the Labor Department on Friday revised upward its estimates for job creation in August and September, adding a combined 44,000 jobs. Some economists cautioned that Hurricane Matthew may have temporarily prevented businesses from adding to their payrolls.

The final piece of economic data released before Tuesday’s presidential election, the jobs report showed an economy that is steadily emerging from the shadow of the Great Recession, though it is still below its pre-2008 strength.

Jed Kolko, chief economist at Indeed, a job website, described the data as very strong, with the caveat that “the labor market is still not what it was before the recession. Most of these measures are still below where they were in the early 2000s.”

As analysts had predicted, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump seized on different aspects of the data to make the closing arguments in their campaigns. Jacob Leibenluft, a senior policy adviser to the Clinton campaign, said the jobs numbers were “another reminder of the progress we’ve made since the financial crisis: the longest streak of overall job growth on record, an unemployment rate below 5 percent and wages growing at their fastest pace since the recession.”

Stephen Miller, Trump’s national policy director, called the report “disastrous,” saying that it underscores “the total failures of the Obama-Clinton economy.” Miller pointed to the economy’s sub-3 percent growth during President Obama’s term and the nearly 500,000 discouraged workers who did not look for work in October because they believed no jobs were available to them.

In an interview, Labor Secretary Thomas Perez had a different take on the figures, pointing out that the ranks of discouraged workers had dropped to their lowest levels since the beginning of the Obama administration. “It’s important to remember we’re digging out of the worst recession of our lifetime,” he said.