Category: Fact Check

Summary

Despite a mostly civil debate between Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the two disagreed repeatedly not just on policy, but also on the facts. We referee some of those competing claims, and other factual missteps by the vice presidential candidates.

• Vance claimed that housing “is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.” But economists and housing experts say that the primary reason for the tight housing market is the decline in new residential construction that followed the Great Recession.

• Walz misleadingly linked former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts to “an $8 trillion increase in the national debt, the largest ever.” But trillions of that debt were due to bipartisan COVID-19 relief packages. And the debt increase so far under the Biden administration is nearly as high.

• In describing an abortion law Walz signed in Minnesota, Vance said physicians were no longer required to provide life-saving care to infants “born alive.” But he neglected to say that the law still requires such infants to be given proper medical care and be “accorded immediate protection under the law.” Such cases pertain to situations involving induced labor for medical reasons such as fetal abnormalities.

• Vance claimed that “we have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost.” An August inspector general report said about that many unaccompanied minors who illegally entered the U.S. had not shown up for immigration court between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, or had not received a summons to appear in court. The report did not say they were “lost.”

• Walz falsely claimed that “their” Project 2025 will establish a registry of pregnancies, referring to what might happen under a Trump-Vance administration. However, the Trump campaign has disavowed Project 2025. The conservative document advocates mandatory state reporting of abortions and miscarriages, but not the tracking of pregnancy in general.

• Walz said that Project 2025 “is going to make it more difficult, if not impossible, to get contraception and limit access, if not eliminate access, to infertility treatments.” Some policies in the document could in effect limit contraception and infertility treatments, but Trump has said he does not want to restrict access to contraception and that he would expand access to in vitro fertilization.

• Vance incorrectly claimed the U.S. has the “cleanest economy,” while falsely hinting that carbon emissions might not be driving climate change. 

• Vance claimed that because of Vice President “Kamala Harris’ open border, we’ve seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartels.” But the concern of the U.S. and Mexican governments has been American-made guns trafficked from the U.S. to Mexico.

• Walz said “less than 2%” of the border wall that Trump promised “got built.” That undersells the amount of wall built during the Trump administration relative to what was promised.

• Vance blamed Harris for “letting in … 25 million illegal aliens.” That’s a grossly exaggerated figure.

• Walz countered that illegal border “crossings are down compared to when Donald Trump left office,” which is true when comparing the last two months to the last two months under Trump. But looking at Harris’ entire time as vice president, illegal border crossings are up substantially.

• Vance claimed that Harris “let fentanyl into our communities at record levels.” That’s not clear. The amount of fentanyl seized by border officials has increased during the Biden administration, which may indicate that more fentanyl is crossing the border undetected.

• Walz said that the “last 12 months saw the largest decrease in opioid deaths in our nation’s history.” Provisional data show that reported opioid deaths have declined significantly in the 12 months ending in April. But the figure is still higher than it was at the start of the Biden-Harris administration.

• Vance claimed that Trump “could have destroyed” the Affordable Care Act, but instead “worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.” Trump did try to destroy the ACA, including by backing a lawsuit that would have nullified it.

• Walz said that if Trump had repealed the ACA “you lose your preexisting conditions,” adding that if you’ve “got asthma, too bad.” Ending the law would significantly reduce protections for those with preexisting conditions, but before the ACA, employer-based plans couldn’t deny issuing a policy.

• Vance slightly overstated the inflation rate for groceries under Biden and ignored macroeconomic causes for rising prices when blaming Biden and Harris for food inflation.

• Walz claimed that “Donald Trump hasn’t paid any federal tax in the last 15 years,” but that’s not quite right. The former president didn’t pay federal income taxes in 2020, but he did pay various amounts between 2015 and 2018. Trump also did not pay taxes in 10 of the 15 years before he became president.

• Vance said that Trump told his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, to “protest peacefully.” Vance ignored Trump’s role in mobilizing his supporters to gather at the Capitol, and the overall tone and tenor of Trump’s defiant speech.

• Vance falsely claimed that Harris “became the appointed border czar” as vice president. However, Harris was specifically tasked with leading efforts to address the root causes of migration from three Central American countries and was never put in charge of U.S. border security.

The Oct. 1 debate was hosted by CBS News.

Analysis

Vance Brings Immigration to Housing Debate

Vance brought one of his campaign’s key issues — immigration — to the discussion on housing prices, claiming, “You’ve got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.”

For support, the Ohio senator later cited a “Federal Reserve study that we’re happy to share after the debate — we’ll put it up on social media, actually — that really drills down on the connection between increased levels of migration, especially illegal immigration, and higher housing prices.”

But the link he provided on his X account after the debate wasn’t a report from the central bank. Instead, it was the written remarks — about 10 paragraphs long — delivered in May at the annual convention of the Massachusetts Bankers Association by Michelle Bowman, who is on the board of governors for the Federal Reserve.

In her remarks, Bowman offered an overview of the current economy, noting at one point, “Payroll employment has increased at a strong pace through April this year, partly reflecting increased immigrant labor supply.” And, in the same cursory way a couple of paragraphs later, Bowman said, “Given the current low inventory of affordable housing, the inflow of new immigrants to some geographic areas could result in upward pressure on rents, as additional housing supply may take time to materialize.”

So, Vance overstated it when he claimed that this document “really drills down on the connection between increased levels of migration, especially illegal immigration, and higher housing prices.” Her brief remarks recognized a demographic reality that has often been noted by researchers.

Economists and housing experts have agreed that immigration is one of many contributing factors to the tight housing market. But the biggest contributor to the problem is the slowdown in new home construction that followed the Great Recession from December 2007 to June 2009. “Fewer new homes were built in the 10 years ended 2018 than in any decade since the 1960s,” according to Fannie Mae.

Similarly, a report released earlier this year by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University found, “In the homebuying market, a decade plus of underbuilding, elevated mortgage interest rates, and shifting demographics has left homebuyers with few affordable options as home prices continue to rise.”

Vance wasn’t wrong that immigrants — along with growing Gen Z and Millennial households — are part of the demographic changes that have contributed to the tight housing market. But he overstated their impact. As we said, the biggest part of the housing puzzle is the slowdown in home construction after the 2008 recession.

Deficit Under Trump

Walz claimed that Trump “gave the tax cuts that predominantly went to the top class. What happened there was an $8 trillion increase in the national debt, the largest ever.”

As we have written before, the amount of total national debt is correct; however, Trump is not singlehandedly responsible for this increase — nor is the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Trillions of dollars of debt were due to bipartisan coronavirus relief packages.

Also, the total national debt has gone up nearly as much under the Biden administration. During Trump’s term, the total debt went up by $7.8 trillion. So far under President Joe Biden, it has risen by $7.7 trillion, with more than three months until the end of Biden’s term.

The 2017 tax cuts did go “predominantly,” as Walz said, to upper-income groups, but most households paid less in taxes under the law, according to Tax Policy Center estimates. In 2018, 63.6% of the benefits of the law went to the top quintile of earners, but 82% of middle-income earners got a tax cut, the TPC estimated.

The tax cut law added to the debt. Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told us when we wrote about this issue a few years ago that the tax cut law could account for about $1 trillion of the debt increase under Trump. 

But then there were bipartisan bills that added to spending. Trump signed bipartisan budget acts for 2018 and 2019 that “dramatically increased discretionary spending,” Goldwein said. And there were the bipartisan bills to help the U.S. cope with the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic effects. A ProPublica/Washington Post report estimated more than $3 trillion went to COVID-19 relief spending.

Scuffle Over Minnesota Abortion Law

In one of the more heated exchanges of the evening, Walz and Vance argued over the text of an abortion law passed in Minnesota after Roe v. Wade was overturned and ended a constitutional right to abortion.

“The statute that you signed into law,” Vance said of Walz. “It says that a doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide life-saving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion.”

Walz quickly interjected, “That’s not true,” while Vance added, “That is fundamentally barbaric.”

As the two men discussed the issue of abortion more broadly over the next couple of minutes, they again tussled over whether Vance’s description was accurate, with Vance repeatedly asking Walz to explain how he was wrong, and Walz saying it was incorrect and had been fact-checked in the Trump-Harris debate.

The issue came up tangentially in the last debate when Trump said that Walz “says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says, execution after birth — it’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born — is OK.”

As we explained before, killing a baby after birth is illegal in all states and is considered infanticide.

Minnesota’s abortion law, which was passed in 2023, does not have gestational limits, so an abortion can legally occur at any time during pregnancy. This does not mean, however, that women are commonly getting abortions very late in pregnancy.

According to the latest available data from the Minnesota Department of Health, for 2022, 88% of induced abortions in the state occurred at or before 12 weeks of pregnancy. Only two abortions were performed at or after 25 weeks — and none occurred in the ninth month.

Vance’s comments refer to a small change in a provision of the law that eliminated the requirement that medical personnel “preserve the life and health” of an infant “born alive.” 

The law still says that such infants “shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law” and that “[a]ll reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice … shall be taken by the responsible medical personnel to care for the infant who is born alive.”

While Vance refers to “botched” abortions, doctors have said such “born alive” measures pertain to situations involving induced labor for medical reasons such as fetal abnormalities. When we wrote about a federal “born alive” bill, Dr. Colleen McNicholas, an obstetrician and gynecologist speaking on behalf of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told us the “vast majority” of abortions later in pregnancy would be performed with dilation and evacuation, which “is not survivable.” The “only conceivable situation” she could imagine the federal bill being relevant would be “catastrophic pregnancies” in which the parents and care team “intend to deliver the baby,” but know that there’s a chance the baby won’t survive.

Citing an obstetrician, an editorial in the Minnesota Star Tribune explains that the rationale for the removal of mandatory life-saving care is “rooted in compassion for parents who face a devastating diagnosis late in a pregnancy” — and allows, for example, a family to hold a dying child and say goodbye, instead of being forced to provide futile medical care.

“It’s important to note that the 2023 law does not prevent a parent or a doctor from pursuing all medical options,” the editorial notes. “Nor does it remove or reduce the ethical and legal obligations of doctors and hospitals toward any child.”

320,000 ‘Lost’ Children?

While criticizing the Biden-Harris administration’s border policies, Vance claimed that hundreds of thousands of children who illegally came to the U.S. without an adult were missing because of the Department of Homeland Security.

“Right now in this country, Margaret, we have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost,” Vance said. “Some of them have been sex trafficked, some of them, hopefully, are at homes with their families. Some of them have been used as drug trafficking mules. The real family separation policy in this country is unfortunately Kamala Harris’ wide open southern border.”

Vance appeared to be referring to figures in a report the office of the DHS inspector general published in August. In a summary, the report said that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, “could not monitor the location and status of all unaccompanied migrant children” who were released from Department of Health and Human Services custody from fiscal years 2019 to 2023, “or initiate removal proceedings as needed.”

The report later said that more than 32,000 minors did not show up for their immigration court hearings in that period, which includes time during the Trump and Biden administrations. In addition, as of May 2024, ICE had not issued a Notice to Appear in court to more than 291,000 minors, the report said. Such notices are sent at the start of removal proceedings.

“By not issuing NTAs to all UCs [unaccompanied migrant children], ICE limits its chances of having contact with UCs when they are released from HHS’ custody, which reduces opportunities to verify their safety,” the report said. “Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”

But the report did not say that all the children were missing, or “lost,” as Vance claimed.

In a response letter included as an appendix to the report, ICE indicated that it may delay sending notices for various reasons, including if the child has already applied for asylum or another legal status with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Exaggerated Claims About Project 2025 and Pregnancy

Walz’s statements about Project 2025 and pregnancy misstate or overstate what the document proposes. “Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz said. “It’s going to make it more difficult, if not impossible, to get contraception and limit access, if not eliminate access, to infertility treatments.”

The Trump-Vance campaign has attempted to distance itself from Project 2025, a document from the conservative Heritage Foundation laying out policies for a future conservative administration. “President Trump’s campaign has been very clear for over a year that Project 2025 had nothing to do with the campaign, did not speak for the campaign, and should not be associated with the campaign or the President in any way,” campaign spokespeople said in a July 30 statement.

As we’ve written, the 887-page document suggests expanded tracking of abortions and miscarriages, making it mandatory for states to report these events to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, the document does not mention a registry of pregnancies in general. Nearly all states already report anonymous data on abortions to the CDC, although such reporting is not mandatory. Trump has stated that he does not want to monitor women’s pregnancies.

Trump also has said in the past that he does not want to limit access to contraceptives. Project 2025 does directly advocate eliminating the mandate for insurance coverage of an emergency contraceptive, called Ella, while incorrectly suggesting that the pill causes abortions. The document does not comment on more typical contraceptives, such as birth control pills or intrauterine devices. But some recommendations, if followed, could indirectly reduce access. For instance, it calls for ending taxpayer funding to Planned Parenthood, which people use to access contraceptives.

Project 2025 also does not directly mention infertility treatment, although, as we have written, it expresses support for the concept of fetal personhood, or the idea that embryos and fetuses have rights starting at “the moment of conception.” These ideas could be used to justify further laws that could reduce access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, on the basis that embryos created in a lab are people with rights.

Trump has expressed support for IVF, recently saying that under his administration insurance companies would be required to pay for it.

‘Weird Science’ and Not the Cleanest Economy

When the moderators broached the subject of climate change, Vance backed into the issue, making a show of agreeing for a moment that carbon emissions cause climate change — as if the science is not, in fact, settled.

“This idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change. Well, let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of argument, so we’re not arguing about weird science,” he said. “Let’s just say that’s true.”

Vance also said that the U.S. had “the cleanest economy in the entire world.” He later specified he was talking about “the amount of carbon emissions they’re doing per unit of economic output.”

To be clear, there is no question that carbon dioxide emissions, along with emissions of other heat-trapping greenhouse gases — many of them due to the burning of fossil fuels — are primarily responsible for climate change.

Vance is wrong to claim that the U.S. has the “cleanest economy.” According to the most recent figures from Our World in Data, the United States’ carbon intensity, or CO2 emissions emitted per dollar of gross domestic product, is middling, similar to Mexico’s and India’s. American carbon intensity is better than China’s — and is significantly better than places such as Venezuela and Libya — but is worse than all of Western Europe and much of Africa.

Before mentioning climate change, Vance said he and Trump “support clean air, clean water.” It’s worth noting that while Trump has long claimed to be in favor of clean air and water — often when asked about the issue of climate change — his administration rolled back some 100 environmental protection rules.

Illegal Firearms

While the candidates were talking about the rash of gun violence and illegal firearms in the U.S., Vance said: “We know that thanks to Kamala Harris’ open border, we’ve seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartels.”

But we could find no evidence that there has been a “massive influx” of guns brought into the U.S. by the cartels. Instead, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the problem is the flow of American-made weapons into Mexico.

The ATF describes its anti-firearms trafficking campaign as an “ongoing problem of firearms smuggling at the northern and southern borders. Firearms trafficking occurs when individuals illegally purchase firearms in the United States and smuggle the weapons across the southern U.S. border into Mexico and into other countries.” 

“A large number of firearms are procured in the U.S. by straw purchasing cells operating at the direction of cartels which are then smuggled across the southern U.S. border and into Mexico,” the ATF website explains.

A New York Times report on American gun ownership said Mexico’s “cartels and their traffickers are overwhelmingly armed with American guns. They are also armed with American ammunition. Much of the ammunition that cartels rely on is unavailable in Mexico’s legal markets, but anyone can buy a truckload in the United States without even so much as a background check.”

In addition, the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan think tank, said in a February 2024 report that the U.S. and Mexico “have grappled with increasing arms and drug trafficking for several years.” A joint effort to track the origin and number of guns in Mexico found that 70% to 90% of “traced firearms originated from and passed through” the U.S.

As for crime guns used in the U.S., the ATF said in a March 2024 report that U.S. law enforcement agencies in 2021 submitted 460,024 requests for the bureau to trace guns used in the commission of a crime. The ATF was able to trace 365,501, or 79.5%, of the guns to the purchaser. “Nearly all crime guns” it was able to trace came from a licensed U.S. firearm dealer, the report said.

We reached out to the Trump-Vance campaign for evidence to support Vance’s claim, but we didn’t receive a reply.

Border Wall

Walz ridiculed Trump’s progress toward building a border wall, saying, “Donald Trump had four years. He had four years to do this, and he promised you, America, how easy it would be. ‘I’ll build you a big, beautiful wall, and Mexico will pay for it.’ Less than 2% of that wall got built, and Mexico didn’t pay a dime.”

As we have written, Trump fell well short of the border wall he promised repeatedly during the 2016 campaign. But Walz is significantly minimizing the amount of wall that Trump actually got built.

In our report on “Trump’s Final Numbers” we noted that, in total, 458 miles of “border wall system” was built during the Trump administration, according to a CBP status report on Jan. 22, 2021. Most of that, 373 miles of it, was replacement for primary or secondary fencing that was dilapidated or outdated. In addition, 52 miles of new primary wall and 33 miles of secondary wall were built in locations where there were no barriers before.

Walz’s “less than 2%” calculation is based on 52 miles of new wall where there wasn’t any before across a southwest land border that is 1,954 miles long (which actually comes to 2.6%). But Trump did not promise to build a wall across the entire border. During the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly talked about needing 1,000 miles of wall, or about 350 miles more than existed when he took office. (After he took office, Trump attempted to move the goalpost to fewer than 1,000 miles.)

So one could argue Trump only got 15% of the way toward the 350 miles of wall needed to complete the wall he promised during the campaign.

Walz’s comment also underplays the sheer amount of wall built during the Trump administration — more than under any other U.S. president. Specifically, Walz’s estimate minimizes the hundreds of miles of replacement border fencing.

As we wrote in December 2020, “[B]order experts warn not to minimize the impact of the replacement fencing. In some cases, the new barriers erected replaced fencing made from Vietnam-era landing mats. U.S. Customs and Border Protection also has replaced nearly 200 miles of vehicle barriers — the type that people could walk right through — with 30-foot-high steel bollards, lighting and other technology.”

As for Trump’s claim that Mexico would pay for the wall, Walz is correct that that never materialized, despite Trump’s false claims that Mexico was paying through the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement or via a border toll.

According to CBP data provided to FactCheck.org, the Trump administration secured a total of $15 billion during his presidency for wall construction. Some of it was appropriated in annual budgets by Congress, and some was diverted by Trump from counternarcotics and military construction funding. But it was all borne by American taxpayers.

Illegal Immigration

Vance argued that Harris is to blame for “letting in … 25 million illegal aliens.” (Earlier in the debate, Vance put the number at 20 million to 25 million.) Either way, that’s a grossly inflated figure for the number of immigrants who have entered the country illegally during the Biden-Harris administration.

We last wrote about this when, during his debate with Biden in June, Trump put the number at 18 million to 20 million.

We took a deep dive into the immigration numbers in February, and again in mid-June, and we came up with an estimate of at most a third of Trump’s number, and a quarter of the figure cited by Vance in his debate.

Here’s the breakdown:

Department of Homeland Security data show nearly 8 million encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border between February 2021, the month after Biden took office, and May, according to monthly data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s a figure that includes both the 6.9 million apprehensions of migrants caught between legal ports of entry – the number typically used for illegal immigration – and nearly 1.1 million encounters of migrants who arrived at ports of entry without authorization to enter the U.S.

DHS also has comprehensive data, through February, of the initial processing of these encounters. That information shows 2.9 million were removed by CBP and 3.2 million were released with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement or given other classifications, such as parole. (Encounters do not represent the total number of people, because some people attempt multiple crossings. For example, the recidivism rate was 27% in fiscal year 2021, according to CBP.) 

As we’ve explained before, there are also estimates for “gotaways,” or migrants who crossed the border illegally and evaded the authorities. Based on an average annual apprehension rate of 78%, which DHS provided to us, that would mean there were an estimated 1.8 million gotaways from February 2021 to February 2024. The gotaways plus those released with court notices or other designations would total about 5 million.

There were also 407,500 transfers of unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services and 883,000 transfers to ICE. The ICE transfers include those who are then placed in ICE custody, enrolled in “alternatives to detention,” which include technological monitoring, or released by ICE. We don’t know how many of those were released into the country with a court notice. But even if we include those figures, it still doesn’t get us to anywhere near the 25 million cited by Vance.

And we should note that these figures do not reflect whether a migrant may ultimately be allowed to stay or will be deported, particularly since there is a yearslong backlog of immigration court cases.

Border Apprehensions

Asked if he wanted to respond to Vance’s claim about the number of people who crossed the border illegally and were “let in” by Harris, Walz responded, “I guess we agreed not to fact-check. I’ll check it. Look, crossings are down compared to when Donald Trump left office.”

It’s true that the number of apprehensions of immigrants caught illegally crossing into the U.S. was lower in July and August — the latest two months of available data — than the last two months under Trump.

The number of apprehensions of immigrants attempting to enter the U.S. illegally has dropped dramatically after Biden announced a series of executive actions on June 4 designed to address “substantial levels of migration” due to “global conditions,” including “failing regimes and dire economic conditions,” “violence linked to transnational criminal organizations” and “natural disasters” in some countries in Central and South America. Specifically, the proclamation directs border officials to temporarily restrict asylum eligibility and promptly remove many who cross the border illegally between ports of entry when the daily average of encounters reaches 2,500 or more for seven straight days. The policy was immediately implemented on June 5 because levels were already well above that. (For more on the policy, see our story “Q&A on Biden’s Border Order.”)

But comparing the last two months of data under Biden to the last two months under Trump involves some cherry-picking. Prior to the new policies enacted by Biden in June, illegal immigration had soared under the current administration.

In our latest “Biden’s Numbers” update in July, for example, we noted that for the 12 months ending in June, apprehensions totaled 1,894,715, according to Customs and Border Protection. That’s 273% higher than during Trump’s last year in office.

Fentanyl Seizures

While talking about drug addiction, Vance claimed that more fentanyl than ever before has entered the country during the Biden-Harris administration.

“I don’t want people who are struggling with addiction to be deprived of their second chance because Kamala Harris let in fentanyl into our communities at record levels,” he said.

But we don’t know how much illicit fentanyl enters the country each year, because that data is not tracked by the federal government. As the Congressional Research Service explained in a 2020 report, “There are no comprehensive data on the total quantity of foreign-produced illicit drugs smuggled into the United States at or between official ports of entry (POEs) because these are drugs that have generally evaded seizure by border officials.”

For a 2021 story, Bryce Pardo, a drug policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, told us that he sensed that Mexican drug trafficking organizations were producing more fentanyl and that flows of the drug, which is lethal in small doses, were increasing to the U.S. “But we don’t know that for sure,” Pardo said.

What we do know is how much fentanyl is seized by federal officials at the border, most of which is captured in vehicles crossing at legal ports of entry — not on people illegally crossing between those ports. Before fiscal year 2024, which is on track for a year-over-year decrease in fentanyl seized, annual figures had been increasing for several years.

As we’ve written before, the amount of fentanyl seized by border officials had increased by about 462% under Biden and Harris, going from almost 4,800 pounds seized in fiscal year 2020 to roughly 27,000 pounds in fiscal year 2023. Through August, there had been about 19,700 pounds of fentanyl seized in fiscal year 2024, which ended on Sept. 30.

When Trump left office, there had been a 586% increase from the 700 pounds of fentanyl seized in fiscal year 2016, the last full fiscal cycle before the start of his presidency.

Some critics believe that an increase in fentanyl seizures means that more of the drug, not less, is entering the country illegally.

Opioid Deaths

When Walz got a chance to respond to Vance’s claim about an increase of fentanyl coming into the country, the governor said, “And the good news on this is the last 12 months saw the largest decrease in opioid deaths in our nation’s history, 30% decrease in Ohio.”

Opioid deaths in the U.S. are currently trending down, according to provisional data from the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System. There were 72,603 reported opioid deaths in the 12 months ending in April, which was down more than 14% from 84,186 reported deaths for the 12 months ending April 2023, according to the figures.

In Ohio, the figures show a 24.5% decline over the same period, dropping from 4,273 reported deaths to 3,268.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, and synthetic opioids account for the vast majority of all opioid-related deaths, as well as most of all drug overdose deaths.

But the decrease in opioid deaths in the U.S., at least based on the provisional data, comes after years of almost annual increases. From 1999 to 2022, opioid deaths increased every year except 2018, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the CDC.

Also, the 72,063 reported opioid overdose deaths for the 12 months ending in April is still higher than the 68,630 opioid-related deaths in 2020, the year before Biden and Harris took office.

In his remarks, Walz did acknowledge that “there is still more work to do” to get overdose deaths down.

Affordable Care Act

Echoing a claim Trump made in the presidential debate, Vance said that the Affordable Care Act “was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along” and that Trump “could have destroyed the program. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.” Trump did try to destroy the ACA. In addition to trying to repeal and replace it, Trump’s administration supported a lawsuit that would have nullified the entire law.

The lawsuit ultimately failed in 2021.

As we wrote after the last debate, Trump supported a 2017 Republican bill that would have included some, but not all, of the ACA’s protections for those with preexisting conditions. He also pushed the expansion of cheaper short-term health plans that wouldn’t have to abide by the ACA’s prohibitions against denying or pricing coverage based on health status. His administration also slashed advertising and outreach aimed at enrolling people in ACA plans.

Under Trump, the number of people without health insurance went up by 3 million, and the percentage of the uninsured went up by about a half a percentage point.

Preexisting Conditions

Walz countered that if Trump had repealed the ACA “you lose your preexisting conditions” protections. Ending the ACA would reduce the protections for people with preexisting conditions considerably, but there were some protections for those with employer-based plans even before the ACA.

“If you’re sitting at home and you got asthma, too bad,” Walz said of losing the ACA’s protections. “If you’re a woman, probably not. Broke your foot during football? Might kick you out.”

The ACA prohibits insurers from denying coverage or charging people more based on their health status. The law also bars insurers from refusing to cover a certain condition, and it requires plans to cover 10 essential benefits.

But before the ACA, the type of coverage denial Walz described would have happened on the individual market, where people buy their own insurance. Pre-ACA, employer plans couldn’t deny issuing a policy — and could only decline coverage for some preexisting conditions for a limited period if a new employee had a lapse in coverage, as we’ve explained before.

As of 2022, 20 million people, or about 6.3% of the U.S. population, got coverage on the individual market.

The ACA’s expanded protections would benefit people who lost their jobs, retired early or became self-employed and found themselves seeking insurance on the individual market. 

Grocery Inflation

Vance repeatedly focused on the theme of food prices being too high because of the Biden-Harris administration.

“Because she’s been the vice president for three and a half years, she had the opportunity to enact all of these great policies, and what she’s actually done instead is drive the cost of food higher by 25%,” Vance said. Later he referred to “Kamala Harris’ atrocious record, which has made gas, groceries and housing unaffordable for American citizens.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index for food at home, the indexed price of groceries increased by 6.5% in total under the Trump administration and 20.9% in total under the Biden administration so far. The inflation rate has slowed in recent months, with grocery prices increasing by only 1.1% over the last year.

However, as we’ve written before, economists we’ve interviewed say that while Biden’s policies bear some responsibility for rising inflation under his administration, other external factors played a larger role in raising prices. Economists primarily blame rising inflation on the disruptions inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as supply shortages, labor market distortions and increased consumer spending on goods, as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Rising inflation was a global phenomenon in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Trump’s Taxes

During a discussion about the economy, Walz called out teachers, nurses and truck drivers, asking how it was fair for them to pay taxes while “Donald Trump hasn’t paid any federal tax in the last 15 years.”

But that’s not quite right.

Trump didn’t release his tax returns when he ran for president in 2016, and he continued to keep them private during his presidency, so we don’t know about many years of his tax filings.

But the House Committee on Ways and Means reviewed Trump’s returns for tax years 2015 through 2020 after Trump lost a legal battle in 2022 to keep them confidential. On Dec. 15, 2022, the committee released a report, which showed:

• In 2015, Trump reported losses of about $32 million and paid $641,931 in federal income tax;
• In 2016, Trump again reported losses of about $32 million, but paid $750 in federal income tax;
• In 2017, Trump reported losses of about $13 million and, again, paid $750 in federal income tax;
• In 2018, Trump reported an income of about $24 million and paid $999,466 in federal income tax;
• In 2019, Trump reported an income of about $4 million and paid $133,445 in federal income tax;
• In 2020, Trump reported losses of about $5 million and paid no federal income tax.

Previous reporting from the New York Times in 2020 had also detailed some of Trump’s tax returns and found that in 10 of the 15 years before Trump ran for office, he hadn’t paid income taxes. But, for five of them, he had.

Revisionist History

Vance and Walz had a lengthy back-and-forth over Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Vance engaged in revisionist history in his defense of his running mate. Vance said that Trump told his supporters in a speech on Jan. 6, 2021, to “peacefully protest.” But Vance ignored Trump’s role in mobilizing his supporters to gather at the Capitol, and the tone and tenor of Trump’s defiant speech.

As we’ve written, Trump spoke for more than an hour on Jan. 6, 2021, on the Ellipse not far from the Capitol, where members of Congress were gathering to begin the process of accepting the electoral votes that would make Joe Biden president. Trump started his speech by accusing the “radical left Democrats” and the “fake news media” of stealing the election, and urging his supporters not to concede or give up.

“All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats, which is what they’re doing, and stolen by the fake news media,” Trump said. “That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up. We will never concede, it doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.”

He went on to make numerous false and unsupported claims about election fraud in swing states, and called on then-Vice President Mike Pence to “do the right thing” and reject electoral votes for Biden, so that Trump could remain president. He criticized other Republicans for being “weak,” threatening to “primary” them “if they don’t fight.”

“You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” Trump said.

Trump did — as Vance said — use the word “peacefully” once in his speech. Trump said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” Trump said.

But the former president spent most of the speech telling his supporters that Republicans needed to fight back, and he closed by telling them to “fight like hell.”

“Our brightest days are before us, our greatest achievements still wait,” Trump said. “I think one of our great achievements will be election security because nobody, until I came along, had any idea how corrupt our elections were. And again, most people would stand there at 9 o’clock in the evening and say, ‘I want to thank you very much,’ and they go off to some other life, but I said, ‘Something’s wrong here. Something’s really wrong. Can’t have happened.’ And we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

After the speech, many of Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, attacked law enforcement officers and interrupted the counting of the electoral votes, which wasn’t completed until the early hours of Jan. 7, 2021.

Trump also heavily promoted the Jan. 6, 2021, protest on social media, telling his followers in one post: “Be there, will be wild!”

During the debate, Vance focused on the one time that Trump used the word “peacefully.” Vance said, “Remember, he [Trump] said that on January the 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully, and on January the 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the president.”

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell remembered that day differently. In a Feb. 13, 2021, floor speech in the Senate, McConnell blamed Trump for provoking what he called an act of “terrorism” to prevent Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, from certifying Biden as winner of the 2020 election.

“They did this because they’d been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry he lost an election,” McConnell said. “Former President Trump’s actions [that] preceded the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty.”

Vance engaged in false equivalency by saying, “We have to remember that for years in this country, Democrats protested the results of elections. Hillary Clinton in 2016 said that Donald Trump had the election stolen by [Russian President] Vladimir Putin because the Russians bought, like, $500,000 worth of Facebook ads. This has been going on for a long time.”

Unlike Trump, Clinton conceded the 2016 election to Trump in less than 24 hours after the polls closed, despite having won the popular vote in a race that turned on the outcome in three states that she lost by less than 80,000 votes. Subsequently, Clinton did criticize Putin for interfering in the 2016 election, which was well documented in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report and went far beyond Facebook ads. The federal investigation uncovered Russia’s sophisticated computer hacking operation designed to help Trump and hurt Clinton.

Vance Wrongly Repeats ‘Border Czar’ Title

Vance falsely claimed that when Harris was vice president, she “became the appointed border czar.” She did not.

As we have written, in March 2021 Biden tasked Harris with leading efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The Central American initiative, known as the “Root Causes Strategy,” seeks to deter migration from those countries by, among other things, providing funds for natural disasters, fighting corruption, and creating partnerships with the private sector and international organizations.

Harris was not put in charge of U.S. border security, as the “border czar” title implies. That is the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security, currently led by Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

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Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz falsely claimed that Project 2025 calls for the tracking of “all pregnancies” and would require people “to register with a new federal agency” upon getting pregnant. The conservative playbook advocates the reporting of all miscarriages and abortions but does not stipulate the monitoring of all pregnancies.

Walz, the governor of Minnesota, inaccurately described Project 2025’s policies at a rally in Superior, Wisconsin, on Sept. 14. “By the way, Project 2025. … They’ve got a national pregnancy coordinator that tracks all pregnancies,” he said. He then went further to claim that if the ideas in the plan were implemented, people would have to let the government know every time they get pregnant. 

“Think about what they’re saying in Project 2025. You’re going to have to register with a new federal agency when you get pregnant? This is personal, people,” he said.

Three days later, at a rally in Asheville, North Carolina, Walz similarly said: “Trump is trying to create this new government entity that will monitor all pregnancies to enforce their abortion ban.”

As PolitiFact and others have noted, no such policy is included in Project 2025’s 887-page book. What Project 2025 recommends, as we’ve written previously and as we will explain in more detail below, is to expand the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s abortion data collection from states and to make it mandatory. Currently, states are not required to report abortion data to the CDC, but most of them, including Minnesota, do.

Project 2025, which was funded and led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, is meant to be a plan for “the next conservative President.” Many of those who worked on Project 2025 have close ties with former President Donald Trump, but the Republican presidential nominee has said he has “nothing to do with” it. Trump’s campaign has stressed the plan “should not be associated with the campaign.” 

As we’ve written, the plan includes proposals to significantly curtail abortion rights. It calls for the president to “enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support” and deploy “existing federal powers to protect innocent life.” The playbook suggests blocking the mailing of abortion pills, which are used in more than half of U.S. abortions, by enforcing an anti-vice law from 1873; ending mandatory insurance coverage of the emergency contraceptive Ella; and ending federal funding for “Planned Parenthood and all other abortion providers.” (Planned Parenthood provides many services, including tests and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, cancer screenings and contraception services, but Republicans have long sought to eliminate funding for the organization, because it provides abortion services.)

The plan even calls for deleting the word “abortion” from “every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant … and piece of legislation that exists.” But it doesn’t force families to disclose their pregnancies to a federal agency. 

Walz’s inaccurate claims come after a series of similar statements by Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, over the summer.

At the Democratic National Convention, on Aug. 22, Harris said Trump “plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.” As we wrote at the time, Trump hasn’t proposed that, but some of it matches what’s in Project 2025. Days later, on X, she went further, falsely saying that “Trump’s Project 2025” included “monitoring pregnancies and prosecuting women if they have an abortion.”

On Sept. 9, the campaign released an ad that says Project 2025 would “require states to monitor women’s pregnancies” and “bans abortions.” And during the presidential debate, on Sept. 10, the vice president said: “Understand, in his Project 2025, there would be a national abortion — a monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages.” 

There is no mention in Project 2025 about prosecuting women who had abortions, and a spokesperson for the plan told us “there is no call for a national abortion ban in any form.” That’s true, although, as we just described, the proposal suggests numerous policy changes to curtail access to abortion. And again, the plan does not propose monitoring all pregnancies. 

The Project 2025 spokesperson directed us to a Sept. 10 X post by Roger Severino, a Heritage Foundation vice president who authored the relevant section on abortion and who led the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights under Trump.

Claims that Project 2025 “would establish a ‘national abortion monitor’” are “[f]alse,” Severino said in the post. The plan “merely recommends CDC restore the decades-long practice of compiling *anonymous* abortion statistics for all states,” he wrote, adding that the Harris-Walz campaign claims were “hypocritical” and “misleading” since Minnesota already collects such data.

To be clear, it has never been mandatory for states to report abortion data, although in the past, the CDC received data from or estimated the number of legal abortions performed in each state. The agency’s latest annual report, for 2021, includes data from every state except California, Maryland, New Hampshire and New Jersey.

Project 2025 does mention a “dedicated Special Representative for Domestic Women’s Health” in the Department of Health and Human Services who would “lead on all matters of federal domestic policy development related to life and family.”

The description of the role occurs in a section that states HHS “should return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care and by restoring its mission statement under the Strategic Plan and elsewhere to include furthering the health and well-being of all Americans ‘from conception to natural death.’” But it does not specify any kind of pregnancy monitoring. (In a different chapter, Project 2025 also includes a “pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families,” which some of our fact-checking colleagues have noted. But the proposed position, which would exist under the U.S. Agency for International Development, does not involve domestic abortion data collection.)

As for Trump’s position, in April, Time magazine asked Trump if he thought “states should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban.” He replied, “I think they might do that,” but said it would be left up to individual states. Trump iterated that would be a decision for each state to make in an interview with WGAL, an NBC affiliate in Pennsylvania, in May.

More recently, in a rally in Arizona on Sept. 15, Trump explicitly said he was opposed to tracking pregnancies. “She claimed I want to monitor women’s pregnancies,” he said of Harris. “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to. It’s a total lie. I don’t want to do that. Women, I won’t be following you around to the hospital monitoring.”

Project 2025 on Abortion Data Collection 

As we said, Project 2025 calls for making it mandatory for states to report miscarriages and abortions — but not pregnancies — to the CDC. The CDC has been collecting anonymous data of legal induced abortions and some characteristics of patients since 1969.

The proposal comes in a chapter about HHS, under recommendations for the CDC, which also include eliminating “programs and projects that do not respect human life and conscience rights and that undermine family formation.”

Under a subhead on data collection, it reads:

Project 2025, page 455: The CDC’s abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate. CDC abortion data are reported by states on a voluntary basis, and California, Maryland, and New Hampshire do not submit abortion data at all. Accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths are essential to timely, reliable public health and policy analysis.

Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion. In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion. Moreover, abortion should be clearly defined as only those procedures that intentionally end an unborn child’s life. Miscarriage management or standard ectopic pregnancy treatments should never be conflated with abortion.

“This section might be best described as disinformation,” Amanda Jean Stevenson, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the impacts of abortion, told us in an email. 

Stevenson said the text rejects “decades of high-quality peer-reviewed science on abortion,” adding that the language reflects either unfamiliarity with the meaning of certain medical terms or an intention to “misrepresent and stigmatize abortion.”

“For example, the proposed distinction between ‘procedures that intentionally end an unborn child’s life’ (sic) and the rest of medicine for pregnant people is ill-defined and contrary to the experiences of patients and physicians,” she wrote.

Stevenson also objected to the suggestion that complications of abortion are not currently sufficiently captured. “Our systems already monitor for abortion complications at least as well as we do for any other outpatient procedures,” noting that the existing systems monitor for abortion mortality “with a high degree of sensitivity.”

“Evidence points to our system overestimating maternal death – of which abortion death is a part,” she said. “We have no reason to think that we underestimate maternal death after abortion.” Moreover, she said, better monitoring would require the type of data integration that is only possible with a nationalized health system.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group that supports abortion rights, as of September 2023, 46 states and D.C. require providers to submit regular and confidential reports to the state. The data is collected in a form that typically includes the name of the physician and the facility where the procedure was performed; age, race, ethnicity, marital status and number of previous live births of the patient; gestational age and abortion procedure used, including the use of medication.

The exact data collected, however, is up to the state — and not all abortions are reported. “In most states and jurisdictions, the collection of abortion data is facilitated by a legal requirement for hospitals, facilities, or physicians to report abortions to a central health agency; however, reporting is not complete in all areas, including in certain areas with reporting requirements,” the latest annual CDC report explains.

Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist with the Guttmacher Institute, told us abortion reporting should remain voluntary. Even though having data on abortion is important, the reporting has often been used with political reasons, according to the Guttmacher Institute’s research. For example, asking for the patient’s reason for a procedure, as Project 2025 suggests, can provide data that could be useful to push certain agendas. (Sixteen states, including Minnesota, already collect some data on reasons for a procedure.)

“A common anti-abortion tactic is to claim that most abortions are not for health-related reasons but for personal preference or even convenience, and therefore do not constitute necessary health care,” he told us in an email, referring us to a post by the anti-abortion rights organization Charlotte Lozier Institute as an example.

When reporting is used for political reasons the questions can get “highly intrusive into patient privacy and risk patient confidentiality,” he wrote, which in turn could discourage people from getting needed care. After the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, several states stopped collecting these data partly because of privacy concerns, he added.

Project 2025’s suggestion to collect data on miscarriage is also “unusual,” Maddow-Zimet wrote. Most pregnancy losses occur during the first weeks of gestation and “often don’t result in contact with the health care system,” he wrote, so it’s “unclear how these statistics would be collected.”

In a phone interview, Severino told us miscarriage data would only be collected if patients seek medical attention, adding that Walz’s state of Minnesota already collects such data.

Amy Friedrich-Karnik, Guttmacher’s director of federal policy told us the group “cannot speak directly to what parts of the Project 2025” plan support Harris’ and Walz’s claims. But she noted that it is “very likely” the document is not mentioning all the ways in which the pregnancy outcome data it intends to collect would be used.

“In the context of an overarching goal to make any and all abortion care unavailable, there are numerous potential ways this trove of data could be used, including potentially increased efforts to criminalize and prosecute people for their pregnancy outcomes,” she told us in an email.

Severino, however, emphasized that the data would be anonymous — and just as important as a variety of other public health statistics, such as the number of deaths each year from guns or traffic accidents.

“Nothing about individuals. Nothing about tracking people. Nothing about law enforcement,” he said. “That’s not what anonymous statistics are used for.”

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In campaign appearances over the weekend in the swing state of Pennsylvania, former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, falsely accused Vice President Kamala Harris of letting more than 13,000 “illegal immigrant murderers” into the United States.

It’s true that there were 13,099 noncitizens convicted of murder, as of July 21, who were not being detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But the “vast majority” of them entered the country prior to the Biden administration and had their custody status determined “long before this Administration,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement, noting that many were in prison. Also, the noncitizens include those who entered the country legally, such as green-card holders.

Trump and Vance distorted the contents of a Sept. 25 letter that Patrick Lechleitner, the acting director of ICE, sent to Rep. Tony Gonzales. The Republican congressman had requested the number of noncitizens who had committed a crime but were not in ICE custody — a list known as the agency’s non-detained docket.

Lechleitner’s response included a chart that showed there are 13,099 noncitizens convicted of murder who were not being detained by ICE. Homeland Security later clarified in its statement that “many” are in prisons, although it did not tell us how many are incarcerated when we inquired.

Gonzales posted Lechleitner’s letter to X on Sept. 27. The next day, Vance referenced the 13,099 murderers at a campaign event in Newtown, Pennsylvania, and Trump did the same in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. A day later, Trump repeated the claim in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Vance, Sept. 28: Do you know that there are 13,000 — I know some of you are nodding because some of you saw this — 13,000 illegal immigrant murderers in the United States of America right now. They’re in this country because Kamala Harris let them in this country.

Trump, Sept. 29: During her term, it’s not even believable, she let in 13,099 convicted murderers. Some of them had murdered 10 people, some murdered seven. One murdered six.

In its statement, the Department of Homeland Security said data in Lechleitner’s letter had been “misinterpreted.”

“The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration,” the statement said. “It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”

Similarly, Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, told us that people have been on the non-detained docket “for decades.”

“There is a lot of confusion around the non-detained docket,” including “who is on it and how long they’ve been on it,” Mittelstadt said in an email. “This docket has grown under multiple administrations, including the Trump one. Significant numbers of people on the docket have been on it for decades.”

For example, the ICE acting director said in his letter that there are 425,431 convicted criminals on the agency’s non-detained docket as of July 21. But, as Mittelstadt noted, ICE reported in a budget document “that there were 405,786 convicted criminal noncitizens on the non-detained docket in June 2021 – so the vast majority would have gotten on during the prior administrations as the Biden administration by then was just five months old.” The number of people on the docket has increased by nearly 5% in about three years.

She also told us that “the non-detained docket includes not just unauthorized immigrants but green-card holders and noncitizens on long-term non-immigrant visas who have made themselves removable by virtue of a criminal conviction.”

The ICE letter to Gonzales did show that, as of July 21, there were an additional 1,845 noncitizens on the non-detained docket who face murder charges. But, again, we don’t know when those 1,845 people entered the United States, how many of them may have entered illegally and when they committed their alleged crimes. We also do not know if they are being held by other local, state or federal law enforcement agencies. A Homeland Security spokesperson did not respond when we asked for such information.

We asked the Trump campaign to respond to the evidence that contradicts its candidates’ claims that Harris let 13,099 “illegal immigrant murderers” into the United States. We also asked it to supply information about Trump’s claim that some of the 13,099 “had murdered 10 people, some murdered seven.” In response, Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s national press secretary, said Trump “will begin the largest mass deportation in history on day one.”

Mittelstadt said some murderers and other criminals cannot be deported “because their country will not accept their return.” In addition, she said, a 2001 Supreme Court ruling generally bars ICE from detaining noncitizens for more than six months if they are unlikely to be deported. As a result, ICE says on its website that it “has been legally required to release thousands of noncitizens, including those with serious criminal convictions.”

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Former President Donald Trump claimed that Democrats are “getting ready to CHEAT” by encouraging overseas citizens to vote, falsely saying that ballots are being sent overseas “without any citizenship check or verification of identity, whatsoever,” and warning of “foreign interference.”

Trump then went on to say, “Remember, IF YOU VOTE ILLEGALLY, YOU’RE GOING TO JAIL.” In fact, it is perfectly legal for U.S. citizens living outside the U.S. to vote in federal elections, and there is no evidence that Democrats are trying to appeal to anyone other than legal voters. Also, while Democrats have been more active this year trying to encourage more citizens living abroad to vote, Republicans have made efforts to mobilize overseas voters as well.

Here’s the full message Trump posted to Truth Social on Sept. 23: “The Democrats are talking about how they’re working so hard to get millions of votes from Americans living overseas. Actually, they are getting ready to CHEAT! They are going to use UOCAVA [The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act] to get ballots, a program that emails ballots overseas without any citizenship check or verification of identity, whatsoever. (Foreign interference?) Remember they say, we have the ‘most secure elections in history,’ and anyone can get a ballot emailed to them! They want to dilute the TRUE vote of our beautiful military and their families, who Comrade Kamala has totally disrespected and abandoned. Republicans must act to stop them from stealing our military votes. WATCH! Remember, IF YOU VOTE ILLEGALLY, YOU’RE GOING TO JAIL.”

With polls showing a very tight race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, both parties are fighting for every vote, and Democrats see overseas citizens as a largely untapped constituency that is likely to lean Democratic.

Data from the Election Assistance Commission’s 2020 voting survey found that nearly 890,000 overseas ballots were counted in the 2020 election, a nearly 74% increase from 2016. That includes both uniformed service members and their families but also civilian overseas citizens. That second batch — which includes dual citizens, students spending a semester abroad, businesspeople on overseas assignments and those who have retired abroad — drove most of the growth, and is the constituency Democrats are focusing on.

Despite the large jump in overseas voting in 2020, those voters represent just a fraction of the eligible overseas voters scattered around the globe.

There is some uncertainty about the number of U.S. citizens living abroad. In its report, the EAC said an estimated 1.4 million uniformed service members and about 600,000 military spouses and voting age dependents were stationed abroad. It also reported an estimated 2.9 million voting age civilian citizens living abroad. With fewer than 890,000 total overseas votes counted in the 2020 presidential election, the voting participation rate among overseas residents was about a quarter of the participation rate among domestic voters, which was 66%.

Democrats have stepped up their efforts this year to find overseas citizens and to direct them to resources to vote. According to Politico, the Democratic National Committee and private donors have raised $450,000 to mobilize Americans from swing states living abroad. Politico said that effort “includes direct advertising on traditional media and social media, billboards across Canada, mailers and in-person gatherings.”

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Corey Booker were two of the headliners for an online campaign event on Zoom promoting voting among overseas citizens in early September. Some 60 politicians, social media influencers and actors — such as Jane Fonda, Alfre Woodard, Kyra Sedgwick and Lynda Carter — also participated in the event, which was viewed by 33,000 people, according to Democrats Abroad.

So Trump is right that Democrats are “working so hard” to get votes “from Americans living overseas.” But Trump’s post could leave the false impression that overseas citizens can’t vote. The right for overseas citizens to vote — whether they are temporarily, permanently or indefinitely living abroad — is enshrined in federal law.

The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, enacted by Congress and signed by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1986, consolidated and upgraded existing laws to require states to allow American citizens living abroad to register and vote absentee in federal elections. Among its provisions was a federal postcard application that allowed service members and overseas citizens to register to vote and request an absentee ballot simultaneously.

In 2010, then-President Barack Obama signed a bill that included major revisions to the UOCAVA that required states to provide overseas voters with the option to request and receive voter registration and ballot applications via “electronic transmission.” It also created the option to electronically transmit absentee ballots to eligible overseas voters (though most states require that the ballots be mailed back). And the changes required states to provide ballots to overseas voters no later than 45 days before the election, in order to give adequate time for ballots to be mailed back by Election Day.

The methods of verifying an overseas voter’s identity and eligibility vary by state, but most require either a valid state driver’s license or the last four digits of a person’s Social Security number, according to the U.S. Vote Foundation, a nonpartisan group that provides online tools to assist U.S. citizens living abroad in registering to vote and requesting their absentee ballot using their state’s specific voter forms. Registrants must provide a valid signature under penalty of perjury. Most states also require overseas voters to sign their ballots, and the signature is matched against the signature from the voter’s registration. A handful of states further require witnesses to sign a voter’s ballot documents.

Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, president and CEO of the U.S. Vote Foundation and Overseas Vote, told us in a phone interview from Germany that the rules would make it “nearly impossible” to pull off widespread fraud through overseas voting. Votes are cast in thousands of voting jurisdictions, she said, and so you’d have to track down not only the identity of people living overseas, but also the jurisdiction of a state where they are eligible to vote.

“The ballots are highly scrutinized by election officials,” she said. “And any sudden increase [in a voting jurisdiction] would be a huge red flag.

“The program has been going on for decades, and the only time I’ve heard of fraud was in 2022 when an election official in Wisconsin fraudulently obtained a ballot to prove the system could be duped,” Dzieduszycka-Suinat said. (She is referring to the case of Kimberly Zapata, who was serving as deputy director at the Milwaukee Election Commission in 2022 and obtained three military absentee ballots using fake names and Social Security numbers, the Associated Press reported. Though Zapata said she was simply trying to expose flaws in the system, she was convicted of election fraud. She lost her job, was fined $3,000 and was ordered to perform 120 hours of community service.)

“It’s not an area where you’re going to find a long history of voter fraud,” Dzieduszycka-Suinat said. “There are all kinds of checks and balances.”

Responding to Trump’s post, a press release from Democrats Abroad — the official Democratic Party arm for Americans living outside the United States — said, “Ballots are only sent to people whose registration has been confirmed and validated by their local elections office. This latest baseless accusation of fraud is yet more desperate fear-mongering by a man whose political playbook is grounded in preemptively delegitimizing the votes of Americans he assumes are less likely to support him.”

Jay Sexton, a history professor and director of the University of Missouri’s Kinder Institute, said “there are many wrinkles and variations in how mail ballots work” because states run the processes for mail-in ballots that are sent overseas.

“Voters must affirm their identity (signing outside of the envelope, which is matched to voter registration card signature, for example),” Sexton told us in an email. “This is an example of a verification process for mail in ballots. I have not seen any evidence of widespread electoral fraud related to overseas ballots since I started following this topic in 2014.”

Could Overseas Votes Swing the Outcome of the Election?

As we said, nearly 890,000 overseas votes were counted in the 2020 election, a nearly 74% increase from 2016, according to the Election Assistance Commission.

Although most overseas ballots were historically cast by uniformed service members and their families, that changed in 2016, when a majority were cast by civilian overseas citizens. In 2020, overseas citizens made up 57.4% of overseas registered voters, compared with 42.3% who were uniformed service members.

Democrats point to Biden’s razor-thin margins of victory in 2020 in Arizona and Georgia –10,457 votes and 11,779 votes, respectively — as evidence that overseas absentee ballots make a difference. According to EAC, 18,435 overseas absentee ballots were counted in Arizona, and 18,475 in Georgia. (That includes both uniformed service members and their families as well as civilian overseas citizens.)

“Your votes from abroad truly have the power to change the outcome of the election,” Hillary Clinton said in a video made for Democrats Abroad, appealing to Americans living overseas to vote. “Just think, in 2020 votes from abroad helped to deliver Georgia and Arizona for President Biden and Vice President Harris.”

Overseas votes also played a prominent role in the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, the closest in U.S. history. After counting nearly 2,500 absentee overseas votes in Florida, Republican George W. Bush ended up beating Democrat Al Gore in the state by 537 votes, giving Bush the presidency.

A New York Times analysis of the overseas votes in Florida concluded that 680 of them were “questionable,” for reasons such as ballots lacking postmarks, ballots postmarked after the election, ballots lacking witness signatures and ballots mailed from towns and cities within the United States. The analysis did not identify that these votes were cast illegally, but the Times concluded they should have been disqualified according to Florida election law. Although the Times could not say whom those votes were for, the vast majority were in counties won by Bush. However, the story notes, “The Times study found no evidence of vote fraud by either party.”

Republicans Wooing Overseas Voters, Too

Trump commented on Democrats, but Republicans have also made efforts to mobilize overseas citizen voters.

“The RNC is working hand-in-glove with the Trump Campaign to reach all eligible voters — including those abroad — to turn out the GOP electorate for an unprecedented win on Nov. 5,” RNC spokesperson Anna Kelly told Politico.

The website for Republicans Overseas, which has no official affiliation with the GOP, provides information on overseas voter eligibility and voter registration.

Greg Swenson, chair of Republicans Overseas UK, told the Financial Times that his group actively promotes Trump’s campaign on social media and in press engagements, in addition to hosting a fundraising event for its 1,500 members. Swenson boasted that the fundraising event raised $2.5 million and was the largest fundraiser ever held outside the U.S.

“We’ve hired 20 paid employees in the UK, in addition to volunteers, just to chase ballots and help with voter registration,” Swenson said.

Nonetheless, Democrats have generally been more aggressive about courting overseas votes.

“Democrats have done more to organize themselves in overseas groups,” Sexton, from the University of Missouri, said. “This is the most recent phase of a better Dem organization overseas that dates back decades, including overseas voters having representation at the party convention.”

“Republicans have attempted to catch up in recent cycles,” he said, but it may be more difficult for Republicans to woo overseas voters who traditionally lean left.

Partisan Leaning of Overseas Voters

Conventional wisdom holds that overseas ballots cast by uniformed service members and their families skew Republican, while votes cast by overseas civilians favor Democrats. But there is no solid data on that.

According to AP VoteCast surveys, 59% of U.S. military veterans supported Trump in the 2020 election.

“Every vote is going to matter in this close election,” Sexton told us via email. “I don’t have firm polling data on this cycle, but it is reasonable to predict that Democrats carry more overseas ballots than do Republicans among non-military voters abroad. … Just remember that US expats are a very diverse group: study abroad students, transient businesspeople, artists/authors, dual citizens, return migrants, retirees in Panama, etc, etc.”

“From all the analysis that we’ve done and seen, something like 80 percent of Americans abroad vote Democrat,” Bruce Heyman, the former U.S. ambassador to Canada who is co-heading the Americans Abroad for Harris-Walz, a branch of Democrats Abroad, told Politico. “It’s because they care about foreign policy and the stature of America in the world and are very worried about a potential Trump return.“

DNC officials told Reuters there are more than 1.6 million Americans living overseas who are eligible to vote in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

But the actual number of eligible overseas voters and their partisan breakdown is largely unknown, Dzieduszycka-Suinat said. U.S. citizens are not required to register their location with the U.S. government. While the Federal Voting Assistance Program estimates there are just under 3 million American citizens of voting age living abroad, that’s a pre-pandemic calculation, she said, and many believe there are far more who have left the U.S. since the pandemic.

“I’m not upset that there has been an increased emphasis on overseas voting,” said Dzieduszycka-Suinat, a U.S. citizen who has been living abroad for 30 years. “We might live abroad, but we really do care. We know how foreign policy affects things. We see it every day.”

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In recent remarks, Vice President Kamala Harris has cited several economic analyses, claiming they found her plan would “strengthen the economy” and former President Donald Trump’s plan would “weaken it.” But that’s not exactly what some of those reports said.

In a Sept. 19 campaign event with former talk show host Oprah Winfrey, Harris criticized Trump’s economic plans, saying that he wanted to give “another tax break for billionaires and the biggest corporations that would add $5 trillion to our deficit” and that he had proposed “what I call a Trump sales tax, which is basically he’s going to put a 20% tax on everyday necessities, that economists have estimated will cost the average American $4,000 more a year, which is why Goldman Sachs, which is why Moody’s, which is why Wharton School of Business, which is why 16 Nobel laureates have collectively determined after analyzing our plans, one, mine would strengthen the economy, his would weaken it. Two, that on his plan, he would actually blow up inflation and invite a recession by the middle of next year.”

We’ve written before about Harris’ characterization of Trump’s plans. The $5 trillion figure is the estimated 10-year cost of extending all the tax cuts in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed in December 2017, but those tax changes benefited people of all income groups — not only billionaires and big corporations. Harris’ reference to “a Trump sales tax” costing average Americans $4,000 a year is a high-end estimate from a liberal think tank about Trump’s plan for “universal baseline tariffs” on imports.

Harris again cited the Nobel laureates, Goldman Sachs and Moody’s in an interview that aired Sept. 25 on MSNBC, saying they found that “my plan would grow the economy, his would shrink the economy,” and the same day in a speech in Pittsburgh, she referred to “a survey of top economists by the Financial Times and the University of Chicago,” saying it “found that, by an overwhelming 70 to 3% margin, my plan would be better for keeping inflation low.”

Harris was mostly correct in her description of Moody’s Analytics, the Financial Times survey and the 16 Nobel laureates, except the latter commented on President Joe Biden’s economic policies, not Harris’ proposals since she became the Democratic presidential nominee. But she is wrong about the Wharton analysis and exaggerates what Goldman Sachs said.

We’ll explain what each economic group determined.

Penn Wharton Budget Model

In the campaign event with Winfrey, Harris cited the “Wharton School of Business.” She is referring to analyses performed by the Penn Wharton Budget Model of Harris’ and Trump’s tax and spending plans, and PWBM did not conclude that her plan “would strengthen the economy, his would weaken it,” as she said.

PWBM found that Harris’ plan would reduce the nation’s gross domestic product more than Trump’s, and would reduce workers’ wages more.

PWBM did conclude that Trump’s plan would add about twice as much to the nation’s debt, but PWBM warned that the debt added by both candidates’ plans would fall on “future generations who must finance almost the entirety of the tax decreases” each has proposed.

PWBM determined that under Harris’ tax and spending plan, “Relative to current law, GDP falls by 1.3 percent by 2034 and by 4 percent within 30 years (year 2054). Capital investment and working hours fall, thereby reducing wages by 0.8 percent in 2034 and by 3.3 percent in 2054.”

It also found that Harris’ plans would increase cumulative deficits by $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years on a conventional basis and by $2 trillion on a dynamic basis. (Dynamic forecasts take into account the policies’ expected effects on economic activity.)

More generally, PWBM concluded: “Lower and middle-income households generally benefit from increased transfers and credits on a conventional basis, while higher-income households are worse off.”

PWBM’s analysis of Trump’s tax and spending plans concluded that his would cause even bigger deficits.

“We estimate that the Trump Campaign tax and spending proposals would increase primary deficits by $5.8 trillion over the next 10 years on a conventional basis and by $4.1 trillion on a dynamic basis that includes economic feedback effects,” the analysis stated.

But it found that the Trump plan’s impact on the GDP, while still negative, was not as bad as Harris’.

PWBM concluded that while GDP would increase during the first part of the next decade under Trump’s plan, “GDP eventually falls relative to current law, falling by 0.4 percent in 2034 and by 2.1 percent in 30 years.” In addition, “After initially increasing, capital investment and working hours eventually fall, leaving average wages unchanged in 2034 and lower by 1.7 percent in 2054.”

“Low, middle, and high-income households in 2026 and 2034 all fare better under the campaign proposals on a conventional basis,” PWBM concluded.

The analyses of Harris’ and Trump’s plans did not include their call to eliminate the taxation of tips earned by service workers. Both campaigns would have to offer “a considerable number of additional details” in order to analyze their plans, PWBM said.

Similarly, PWBM did not include Trump’s proposal to impose across-the-board tariffs of between 10% to 20% on all imported goods. “Key implementation details” are missing from Trump’s plan, the PWBM analysis stated. “While new import taxes and tariffs could raise several trillion dollars in new revenue over the next decade, they could also lead to revenue losses due to potential retaliatory actions from other governments and other economic dynamics.”

Goldman Sachs

In her interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, Harris said analysts at Goldman Sachs, a global investment and wealth management firm, “said my plan would grow the economy” and Trump’s “would shrink the economy.”

In fact, the analysts found that the economy would continue to grow under both candidates. If Trump wins, the growth would be a bit smaller in Trump’s first year, but that “abates in 2026,” the report said. If Harris wins, there would be at best a “very slight boost to GDP growth” in the first two years, the report said, referring to the real GDP, which is adjusted for inflation.

The company’s chief executive officer suggested the difference in the economic impact between the two candidates isn’t significant.

“I think a lot more has been made of this than should be,” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said in a Sept. 11 interview on CNBC, when he was asked about similar remarks that Harris made the previous night during the presidential debate.

The Harris campaign referred us to news articles about a Sept. 3 research note written by several Goldman Sachs research analysts, including Alec Phillips, the firm’s chief political economist. The Harris campaign did not provide us with a copy of the analysis, but we did obtain a copy of the 23-page report.

Here we will summarize the analysis, and what the company’s CEO said about it.

The researchers said they reviewed “likely changes to trade, immigration, and fiscal policy” by both candidates and estimated “the effects on inflation, labor force growth, GDP, and the deficit” under different election outcomes — a Republican sweep, a Democratic sweep or divided government.

For Trump, the analysis assumed that the former president will raise tariffs on Chinese goods by an average of 20 percentage points, and increase tariffs on auto imports from Mexico and the European Union. It also assumed Trump will reduce immigration and extend the expiring provisions of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017, while discounting other Trump tax cuts as unlikely to pass Congress.

The analysts assumed that Harris, on the other hand, will not raise tariffs and immigration will slow but remain “above the pre-pandemic trend.” They also assumed that Harris would seek to extend some, but not all, of the 2017 tax cuts, as well as increase the child tax credit and propose a tax credit for first-time homebuyers.

What would be the net impact of these plans on the nation’s economic growth?

First, it’s important to note that the analysis includes a chart that shows Goldman Sachs estimates that the nation’s real GDP will increase by 2% or more in 2025, 2026 and 2027. The net effect of Trump’s immigration, trade and fiscal policies would slightly reduce that growth in 2025, the report said.

“We estimate that if Trump wins in a sweep or with divided government, the hit to growth from tariffs and tighter immigration policy would outweigh the positive fiscal impulse, resulting in a peak hit to GDP growth of -0.5pp in 2025H2 that abates in 2026,” the report said.

In short, real GDP would continue to grow, but at 0.5 percentage point less than it otherwise would in the second half of 2025.

As for a Harris victory, the analysts at Goldman Sachs said: “If Democrats sweep, new spending and expanded middle-income tax credits would slightly more than offset lower investment due to higher corporate tax rates, resulting in a very slight boost to GDP growth on average over 2025-2026. If Harris wins with divided government, the effects of policy changes would be small and neutral on net.”

In the CNBC interview, Solomon was asked about Harris’ use of his company’s report during the debate. Harris said, “What Goldman Sachs has said is that Donald Trump’s plan would make the economy worse. Mine would strengthen the economy.”

“I think a lot more has been made of this than should be,” Solomon said. “What the report did is it looked at a handful of policy issues that have been put out by both sides, and it tried to model their impact on GDP growth. The reason I say a bigger deal has been made of it is what it showed is the difference between the sets of policies that they put forward was about two-tenths of 1%, OK? So [the] economy grows, OK, if you took these particular sets of policies they looked at.”

Moody’s Analytics

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, has said that if Harris and Trump were able to get all their policies enacted, the economy would thrive more under a Harris administration.

“Assuming Harris and Trump are able to fully implement the policies they have proposed when they take office, the economy will perform better under Harris than under Trump in their terms,” Zandi told Newsweek in a Sept. 20 article. “That is, real economic growth will be stronger, inflation and interest rates lower and budget deficits and debt lower under Harris’ policies than under Trump’s policies,” he said.

However, a Moody’s Analytics report published in early August said that it’s most likely if Harris wins the election, she will have to deal with a divided Congress – making it difficult to execute her full agenda, which Moody’s assumed would be similar to what was in the Biden-Harris administration’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2025. But that scenario would still work out better for the economy than if Trump becomes president with a Republican-controlled Congress, the second likeliest outcome, the analysis said.

Even with a split Congress, Moody’s economists projected that Harris’ proposals would lead to average annual economic growth of 2.1% from 2024 to 2028. The economy would still grow under Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress – contrary to Harris’ suggestion in the MSNBC interview that the economy would “shrink” – but the increase would occur at a slower average rate of 1.3% annually.

Moody’s also said that “under the Republican sweep scenario,” consumer price inflation increases from 3% in 2024 to 3.5% in 2025, “fueled by the higher tariffs, outflow of foreign immigrants, the resulting tighter labor market and more quickly rising labor costs, and tax-cut-fueled fiscal stimulus.” Real incomes and consumer and business sentiment would be weighed down by the higher inflation and interest rates, starting a recession by the middle of 2025, the analysis said, as Harris indicated in her remarks about Trump’s plans.

“While the economy recovers beginning in mid-2026,” the analysis said, “employment is still 3.2 million jobs lower and the unemployment rate is nearly half a percentage point higher by the end of Trump’s term” than it would be at the end of a four-year Harris term.

On the other hand, under a Harris presidency with Republicans running the Senate, the annual rate of inflation would decline to 2.4% in 2025, and interest rates would fall to about 3% before the start of 2027. Annual deficits also would be lower under Harris and a divided Congress, Moody’s said, as would the ratio of debt to GDP.

Notably, Moody’s said that a “lack of transparency and specificity” made it difficult to analyze the macroeconomic impact of Trump’s policies, and a wide range of proposals by the Biden-Harris administration complicated the analysis of potential Harris policies.

Financial Times/Chicago Booth Survey

In Pittsburgh, Harris correctly cited a survey by the Financial Times and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “A survey of top economists by the Financial Times and the University of Chicago found that, by an overwhelming 70 to 3% margin, my plan would be better for keeping inflation low,” she said.

The survey, which the Financial Times wrote about on Sept. 14, asked 37 economists: “If the Harris or Trump economic platforms were to be enacted, which do you think would be more inflationary in the medium term?” In response, 70% said Trump’s plans would be more inflationary; 27% said that there would be “no material difference in their inflationary consequences,” and 3% said Harris’ plans would be more inflationary.

There was a similar response to the question about federal deficits: 70% said Trump’s plans would lead to larger deficits; 19% said there would be “no material difference,” and 11% said Harris’ plans would “produce larger federal budget deficits in the medium term.”

Those two questions were the only ones in the survey that asked about the presidential candidates.

Nobel Laureates

Harris referred to “16 Nobel laureates” in the event with Winfrey and other events. Those Nobel Prize-winning economists commented on Biden’s record in office, not future plans by Harris. But they did praise the Biden administration, while saying they were “deeply concerned about the risks of a second Trump administration for the U.S. economy.”

The 16 economists wrote a letter in June, when Biden was still running for reelection, saying: “While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we all agree that Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump’s. In his first four years as President, Joe Biden signed into law major investments in the U.S. economy, including in infrastructure, domestic manufacturing, and climate. Together, these investments are likely to increase productivity and economic growth while lowering long-term inflationary pressures and facilitating the clean energy transition. … An additional four years of Joe Biden’s presidency would allow him to continue supporting an inclusive U.S. economic recovery.”

On Trump’s plans, the letter said: “Nonpartisan researchers, including at Evercore, Allianz, Oxford Economics, and the Peterson Institute, predict that if Donald Trump successfully enacts his agenda, it will increase inflation. … We believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.’s economic standing in the world and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.’s domestic economy.”

As vice president, Harris clearly supports the actions of the Biden administration and many of the same economic policies as the president, but the Nobel laureates didn’t analyze her plan, as she said.

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Quick Take

In an interview, Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania said some people in his state think former President Donald Trump is a “terrible person” but they say “I will still vote for him.” A social media post misrepresents Fetterman’s comments to claim he supports Trump. The senator supports Vice President Kamala Harris.

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Full Story

Pennsylvania is one of the critical battlegrounds in the 2024 presidential election, with its 19 electoral votes making it a key state for the Republican and Democratic candidates. The state has seen the highest spending on television and radio ads, with over $138 million reserved by groups supporting the two presidential candidates.

Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania has been vocal about supporting Vice President Kamala Harris since President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race on July 21. In a July 22 post on X, Fetterman expressed his backing for Harris, writing, “Proud to support and be all in for the next president, @KamalaHarris.”

Despite this clear endorsement, a Sept. 23 post on Threads misrepresents Fetterman’s comments, suggesting he was shifting his support to former President Donald Trump. The post says, “Wait! Did John Fetterman just say he’s voting For Trump[?] Dude was voted in as a lobotomized Dem and came out a based Republican lol[.] He really should just switch parties at this point.” Text on a video embedded in the post reads, “DEMOCRATS PANIC: John Fetterman makes SHOCKING admission on Trump! BAD NEWS FOR KAMALA!”

This mischaracterization of Fetterman’s remarks stemmed from his interview at The Atlantic Festival in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 19. Fetterman was speaking with the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, when he discussed how some voters continue to support Trump despite his controversial history.

In a short clip of the interview shared on the Threads post, Goldberg asked Fetterman what people see “in Donald Trump that makes them want to vote for him?”

Fetterman responded, “I know some people that are like, ‘I personally think he’s a terrible person, or I am appalled by some of these things. But I fundamentally think that I will still vote for him.’”

In his response, Fetterman also said, “There is energy and there’s kinds of anger on the ground in Pennsylvania, and people are very committed, and Trump is going to be strong, and we have to respect that.”

Trump has been competitive in Pennsylvania in the last two presidential elections. He barely won Pennsylvania in 2016 and lost the state by a slim margin in 2020.

When asked for comment on the social media post, a spokesperson for Fetterman told us in a Sept. 26 email, “He’s not saying he feels this way, he is saying this is how people feel.”

“In this same interview, he spoke at length about his support for VP Harris. He also campaigned for her in Pennsylvania this weekend and has campaigned with her in the commonwealth multiple times in the past month,” the spokesperson added.

Earlier in the Atlantic interview, Fetterman said Pennsylvanians will have to decide if they want four years of Trump’s “kind of chaos” or Harris’ “new way forward.” He added, “And it’s going to be close, and she will prevail.”

On Sept. 5, Fetterman shared a photo alongside Kamala Harris, saying, “Wheels down in Pixburgh with our NEXT PRESIDENT, @KamalaHarris!”

He reiterated his commitment to the Democratic ticket in a post on Sept. 26, saying, “Tonight, I’m in Butler County in a room with the @TheButlerDems. The message: fight for every vote in every county. The mission: President @KamalaHarris.”

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Sources

Bidgood, Jess. “The Four Swing States That Could Matter Most.” New York Times. 25 Sep 2024.

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. “President of the United States, County Breakdown.” 8 Nov 2016.

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. “President of the United States, County Breakdown.” 3 Nov 2020.

Sen. John Fetterman. Spokesperson. Email to FactCheck.org. 26 Sep 2024.

John Fetterman. “Proud to support and be all in for the next president, @KamalaHarris.” X. 22 Jul 2024.

John Fetterman. “Tonight, I’m in Butler County in a room with the @TheButlerDems. The message: fight for every vote in every county. The mission: President @KamalaHarris.” X. 26 Sep 2024.

John Fetterman. “Wheels down in Pixburgh with our NEXT PRESIDENT, @KamalaHarris!” X. 5 Sep 2024.

The Atlantic. “The Rise of Political Polarization With Senator John Fetterman | The Atlantic Festival 2024.” 20 Sep 2024.

Source

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Quick Take

Montana temporarily took down its online system used by citizens and military personnel voting abroad to fix a technical glitch that omitted the Democratic presidential and vice presidential candidates. Social media posts baselessly claimed that the Republican secretary of state purposely and illegally omitted the Democrats.

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Full Story

Montana has supported the Republican candidate for president in every election since 1996. It doesn’t appear Montana’s presidential voting pattern will change in November. Former President Donald Trump leads his Democratic challenger, Vice President Kamala Harris, by about 17 percentage points, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average. 

But there have been concerns about efforts to prevent voters from successfully casting a ballot during this year’s election. 

Earlier this year, the state’s Supreme Court struck down four laws passed in 2021 by the Republican-led state legislature that placed restrictions on voting. The restrictions — including largely ending same-day voter registration and eliminating student ID cards as a form of voter identification — were considered “unconstitutional” by the state’s high court. 

Now, some social media posts are making the unfounded claim that the Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen, a Republican, purposely and illegally left Harris’ name off ballots on the electronic system used by voters living overseas.

Comedian and Harris supporter D.L. Hughley shared a post from Occupy Democrats that read, “If a state left Trump off the ballot, do you think the media would respond with a shrug of the shoulders? The Montana secretary of state left Kamala Harris off the ballot. … They should be forced to start over, and the secretary of state should be jailed.”

A post on Threads said, in part, “Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen left Kamala Harris’s name OFF the Montana absentee ballot! …Republicans out here using weaponized incompetence to steal the election.”

However, the posts have mischaracterized a glitch in Montana’s electronic system for voters eligible to vote early under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, or UOCAVA. Such eligible voters are U.S. citizens living abroad and military members and their spouses. Montana reported that the state received 4,368 UOCAVA ballots in the 2020 election, according to the Election Assistance Commission.

The technical problem, which was resolved within hours, caused the names of Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, not to appear on the electronic ballot on the first day of early voting, Sept. 20.

A Sept. 23 press release from Jacobsen’s office said, “No, Montana did not leave a candidate off the 2024 General Election ballot. Contrary to egregious misinformation campaigns circulating online, the Montana Secretary of State’s Office certified all qualified candidates to appear on its 2024 General Election ballot on August 22.”

The press release went on to say that the “2024 General Election officially began [Sept. 20] for eligible voters covered under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA). Shortly after going live at 8 a.m., election officials were notified about Montana’s Electronic Absentee System (EAS), which is the system exclusively used by a small number of eligible UOCAVA (e.g. Military serving abroad and overseas citizens) voters to access and mark their ballot. The Secretary of State’s Office took the EAS offline while working with the vendor until troubleshooting was completed.” [Emphasis is theirs.]

By the afternoon of Sept. 20, “the system was back online and available to eligible UOCAVA voters, including those few voters who may have been impacted,” the statement said.

“No [print] ballots were affected, including those that will be sent to registered absentee voters and those that will be presented to voters at the polling place on Election Day,” the release said.  

The Office of the Secretary of State told us that it had received a report on Sept. 20 of a ballot not displaying properly for a UOCAVA voter who was using the electronic voting system.

In an email to FactCheck.org on Sept. 25, the office said: “As mentioned, the system was taken offline in the morning for troubleshooting with the vendor, and it was back online in the afternoon. The potentially impacted UOCAVA voter who submitted a ballot has since been contacted, and no further action is required.”

The office later clarified: “The report we received [Sept. 20] from one of our counties stated that a voter had called them and reported that the system had not displayed Vice President Harris (and Tim Walz) under the race for President.”

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Sources

270towin.com. “Montana.” Accessed 25 Sep 2024.

Five Thirty Eight. Montana : U.S. Senate : 2024. Accessed 25 Sep 2024. 

Montana Democratic Party v. Christie Jacobsen. DA 22-0667. Montana Supreme Court. 27 Mar 2024.

NBC Montana Staff. “Montana Secretary of State served lawsuit for illegal removal of voter signatures.” NBC Montana. 10 Jul 2024. 

Montana Secretary of State. Military & Overseas Voters. “UOCAVA Eligible Voters.” Accessed 26 Sep 2024.

Montana Secretary of State. Bulletin. “No, Montana did not leave a candidate off the 2024 General Election ballot.” 23 Sep 2024. 

Montana Secretary of State Office. Email to FactCheck.org. 23 Sep 2024. 

Montana Secretary of State Office. Email to FactCheck.org. 25 Sep 2024.

Source

Political leanings: Pro-Israel

2022 Spending: $32.9 million

United Democracy Project is a nonpartisan super PAC created to advocate for political organizations and candidates that support the United States’ partnership with Israel. The super PAC “works to help elect candidates that share our vision and will be strong supporters of the U.S.-Israel relationship in Congress,” according to its website.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group established in 1959, historically refused to contribute funds to individual candidates’ campaigns. However, AIPAC announced its plans to launch a political action committee, or PAC, and a super PAC ahead of the 2022 election cycle in December 2021.

AIPAC PAC, which was created Dec. 15, 2021, has become the biggest pro-Israel PAC in the U.S., ahead of the Joint Action Committee for Public Affairs and JStreetPAC. United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s super PAC, was established on Jan. 3, 2022.

AIPAC PAC is limited to donating no more than $5,000 per election to a candidate’s campaign committee, according to federal contribution limits for the 2024 election. As a super PAC, United Democracy Project cannot donate to candidates directly, but it can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money expressly advocating for or against federal candidates — spending the Federal Election Commission defines as “independent expenditures.” Both the PAC and super PACs are required to disclose their donors in reports to the FEC.

In March, Politico reported that AIPAC’s organizations are “expected to spend $100 million across its political entities in 2024.”

Through August, United Democracy Project had raised about $68.4 million during the 2024 cycle. The group’s largest contributor, so far, is billionaire Jan Koum, the co-founder and former CEO of WhatsApp, who donated $5 million. Other major donors include financier Jonathon Jacobson, GreenSky CEO and co-founder David Zalik, and Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus. Jacobson gave nearly $4.6 million, Marcus donated $3 million, and Zalik contributed $2 million.

United Democracy Project also has spent about $56 million, and, as of Sept. 22, more than $35.6 million of it was on independent expenditures, the ninth most of any super PAC this cycle, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks money in politics.

United Democracy Project has focused primarily on Democratic House primary races, spending nearly $12.4 million supporting some Democratic candidates, while spending more than $20 million opposing other Democrats. Just over $3 million of its spending has been against four Republican House candidates — two of whom, John Hostettler of Indiana and Rep. Bob Good of Virginia, lost in GOP primaries.

The group spent heavily on the Democratic primary election in New York’s 16th Congressional District between incumbent Rep. Jamaal Bowman and his challenger, Westchester County Executive George Latimer. United Democracy Project spent almost $9.9 million to oppose Bowman and nearly $4.8 million to support Latimer. The New York Times reported that the super PAC’s expenditures on the race “eclipsed what any interest group has ever spent on a single House race.”  

On June 25, Latimer defeated Bowman in the primary, earning over 58% of the vote to about 41% for Bowman.

Bowman has sharply criticized Israel, calling the country an “apartheid state” and falsely referring to reports of rape perpetrated by Hamas terrorists against Israeli women in October as “lies” and “propaganda.” Bowman later walked back his comments, saying that the United Nations had confirmed instances of sexual violence.

In a United Democracy Project ad in May, Elisha Wiesel, son of Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel, asked voters to “stand up to Jamaal Bowman’s lies and conspiracy theories.” Later, Bowman told supporters in a June speech that he was being “attacked by the Zionist regime we call AIPAC.”

After Latimer’s victory over Bowman, AIPAC announced that “UDP will continue to support leaders who promote our partnership with Israel and oppose detractors, regardless of political party.”

In addition to the New York race, United Democracy Project spent more than $5.2 million against Democratic Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, who has been a vocal critic of the Israeli government’s response to attacks by Hamas last fall. Bush was defeated in the Aug. 6 Democratic primary for her 1st Congressional District seat by St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell. United Democracy Project spent an additional $3.3 million on independent expenditures backing Bell’s candidacy.

Bowman and Bush are both members of a group of progressive House lawmakers collectively known as “The Squad.”

United Democracy Project also spent about $4.6 million trying to defeat California state Sen. Dave Min in the primary for the state’s 47th Congressional District. Min, a Democrat, finished in the top two, and will face Republican Scott Baugh in the general election.

During the 2022 election cycle, the super PAC raised more than $35.9 million and spent over $32.9 million, including $26.1 million on independent expenditures either promoting or opposing Democratic House candidates.

Explaining the group’s strategy at the time, United Democracy Project spokesman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in July 2022: “There was rising concern in the pro-Israel community about candidates for Congress who held radical anti-Israel views. What we’re trying to do is build the broadest bipartisan pro-Israel coalition in Congress possible.”

FactCheck.org Undergraduate Fellow Ben Cohen contributed to this article. 

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In Michigan, former President Donald Trump has courted voters in the auto industry with false and no-evidence claims about Chinese auto plants in Mexico and auto industry growth under his administration.

• He has claimed that Chinese companies didn’t build auto plants in Mexico when he was in office because he threatened them with high tariffs, “but right now they’re building some of the largest auto plants anywhere in the world ever built” and they will “wipe you out.” There is only one, small Chinese car manufacturing plant in Mexico right now, experts say, and it was announced in 2017, during Trump’s term. Other companies say they plan to build plants, but they haven’t done so yet.

• Trump has promised “to get the auto workers’ jobs back like it was 30 years ago and 40 years ago before everybody left,” saying “we were all set to” bring back the industry “and then we had the COVID disaster come in.” We can’t predict the future, but auto industry jobs declined between 2019 and 2020, before the pandemic, showing no evidence of a pending boom, as Trump said.

Both the Trump campaign and Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign are focusing on Michigan, a key swing state that Trump won in 2016 and lost in 2020. Trump will visit the state again on Sept. 27. His claims about the auto industry in the state fit a pattern of Trump making false claims about how the industry fared under his presidency compared with Democrats.

Chinese Plants in Mexico

Several Chinese auto companies have said they want to build car manufacturing plants in Mexico, which has raised concerns within the industry and among politicians about those potential plants trying to export the cars to the U.S., particularly cheap electric vehicles that could present stiff competition for the nascent EV industry in this country.

There are few cars exported to the U.S. from China, and the actions and statements by President Joe Biden’s administration, and Trump, indicate they both would like to keep it that way. Cars from China made up 0.49% of U.S. imported vehicles in 2019 and 0.66% in 2023, according to International Trade Commission data. (There is greater trade in automotive parts from China; the share of U.S. imports was 9.96% in 2019 and 9.26% in 2023 for Chinese auto parts.)

In May, the Biden administration increased tariffs on electric vehicles imported from China to 100%; the tariff for all cars, and certain other products, from China had been 25%, set by the Trump administration. Imports of passenger cars from China face an additional 2.5% most-favored-nation tariff.

But those are tariffs on cars coming from China, not China-made goods exported from other countries. This week, the Biden administration proposed banning Chinese-made hardware and software for cars, citing national security concerns, a ban that would apply to Chinese cars no matter where they are produced — such as Mexico.

But so far, the potential threat of China-owned auto plants south of the border remains just that — a threat. There’s only one Chinese auto assembly plant for passenger cars operating in the country now, selling vehicles in Mexico, experts say. Trump, however, has claimed that he put a stop to Chinese auto plant construction in Mexico by threatening 200% tariffs if the cars were to be exported to the U.S. He further claims that such construction on large plants started once he left office and is nearly finished. But experts told us there aren’t auto manufacturing plants under construction right now.

At an Aug. 29 campaign event at Alro Steel in Potterville, Michigan, Trump said, “They’re building, I don’t know if you know, numerous of the biggest auto plants in the world right now … right near the border in Mexico, owned by China. They think they’re going to build the cars and send them in” to the United States. “They’ll take every single job. You’re not going to have any autoworkers within two years, maybe three years. Nobody’s going to be making cars here.”

Trump continued, “I told them, ‘If you do that, we’re going to put tariffs on at 200, 250%. You’re never going to sell one car in this country.’ And they didn’t build them. … As soon as I was gone, they started construction and they’re almost finished, and that’s going to wipe you out.”

At a Sept. 17 town hall event in Flint, Michigan, Trump made the same claims, saying there were “a number of them going up right now,” referring to China-owned plants in Mexico. “They weren’t building anything in Mexico having to do with cars with me, because I said, ‘If you build it, we’re going to put a 200%. You’re not going to sell one car into this country, and but right now they’re building some of the largest auto plants anywhere in the world ever built,” Trump claimed.

Trump made the claim again in Savannah, Georgia, on Sept. 24.

“There’s one Chinese auto plant in Mexico,” Susan Helper, an economics professor at Case Western Reserve University who researches U.S. manufacturing and global supply chains, told us. The company is called Jianghuai Automobile Group, or JAC, and the car plant is “tiny.” JAC’s Mexico factory made 22,000 vehicles last year, or 0.6% of Mexican production, Helper, who worked on the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama and Biden administrations, said.

Those figures are in a report by Scotiabank Economics that shows General Motors was the largest producer of light vehicles in Mexico last year, followed by Nissan and Chrysler.

The Associated Press also reported that the JAC plant was the only Chinese assembly plant in operation in Mexico. The AP fact-checked similar comments Trump made in his speech at the Republican National Convention. “Jeff Schuster, vice president of automotive research for analytics firm Global Data who tracks auto production, said he knows of no Chinese auto assembly plants under construction in Mexico,” the AP reported.

The JAC investment, in an existing facility near Mexico City, was announced in 2017, early in the Trump administration, and production of its vehicles began not long after, according to media reports.

“Right now, they’re considering it,” Bruce Belzowski, managing director of Automotive Futures, a research group in Ann Arbor, told us of Chinese car companies wanting to set up shop in Mexico. “They haven’t built any yet.”

As for Trump’s claim that he threatened 200% tariffs only for Chinese cars coming from Mexico, Belzowski said, “I have intimate knowledge of the Mexican auto industry, and no one ever mentioned that.”

“The auto reporters are usually pretty thorough about this stuff, if they knew about it,” he said. Unless it was “behind closed doors. I don’t know. Who knows.”

We asked the Trump campaign about these claims, but we haven’t received a response.

The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, which Trump negotiated, doesn’t allow for a 200% tariff only on Chinese cars exported from Mexico. Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told us in an email that Trump could impose such tariffs, but it “would violate the USMCA” and “Mexico could retaliate according to its choosing. Probably US agricultural exports would be the first hit. Obviously, tariffs of the magnitude indicated by Trump would seriously damage US-Mexico relations, with lots of repercussions.”

The USMCA, which went into force on July 1, 2020, allows for tariff-free exports from Mexico if they meet requirements for components or materials originating in North America and labor wage requirements. At least 70% to 75% of the content of cars and light trucks would have to be from North America — that’s up from 60% to 62.5% under the North American Free Trade Agreement, which USMCA replaced. Products that don’t qualify for tariff-free export would face a 2.5% most-favored-nation tariff for passenger vehicles, as a Congressional Research Service report explains. (The MFN tariff rate for trucks is 25%.)

There is a “joint review” of the USMCA in 2026, so U.S. and Mexico could come to a new agreement.

If future Chinese auto plants were allowed to export tariff-free to the U.S., “will they kill the US industry?” Belzowski said. “They would be a huge challenge for the U.S. industry, for EVs.” But, he said, such competition “would also jumpstart the U.S. industry to get going” on EVs.

There are incentives in place to boost EV production in the U.S., including tax credits of up to $7,500 for consumers to buy them, if the final assembly of the car was in North America, per the Inflation Reduction Act, signed by Biden in 2022. “The Chinese did this like in 2014, 2015. They’ve been giving incentives for consumers and for the rest of their country to build EVs,” Belzowski said. “So we’re about 10 years behind, and we’re trying to catch up.”

BYD, a Chinese company that makes inexpensive EVs, is one of the companies that has said it is looking to build a plant in Mexico for the Mexican market. Its small Dolphin model retails for $10,000-$12,000 in China, a price that suggests a 2.5% most-favored-nation tariff for future exports from Mexico, under the USMCA now, wouldn’t be much of a deterrent. But Jeff Walling, chief of the advanced technology and machinery division at the U.S. International Trade Commission, said in a March presentation for a bipartisan think tank that there were other reasons such a car wouldn’t make for easy inroads in the U.S. market.

In the presentation — which noted that Walling was expressing his own views, not necessarily the ITC’s — he said, “I feel like we often have these news coverage pieces that come out that are like, China’s going to be able to export duty-free from Mexico or that vehicles are going to be so inexpensive that you don’t care about the tariff. And the example that’s often thrown around is like if you have a $10,000 car,” and a 2.5% tariff wouldn’t add much to the cost of the car. But, Walling said, “the $10,000 car is probably just not a vehicle that’s in high demand in the United States,” because of “a really low mileage threshold,” meaning the distance the car can be driven before it needs to be recharged, or a small size that’s not popular in the U.S.

“I think there would be a couple of different things that China would need to overcome to make a vehicle that meets our rules, is affordable and is desirable,” he said.

That presentation also noted that Chinese companies have been saying since the mid-2000s that they plan to export (generally, not from Mexico) to the U.S. market, and it took some time for other countries, like Japan, to gain a market share in the U.S.

Polestar, an EV made by a Chinese-owned company through a joint venture with Volvo, was being imported into the U.S. Last month, the company opened a factory in South Carolina to produce its electric SUV for the U.S. and for export to Europe.

Auto Industry Jobs

At the Aug. 29 campaign event, Trump also promised to bring auto jobs, or the industry, back to the levels they were 25, 30 or 40 years ago, saying this type of growth was set to happen before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I’m here today with a simple message for the American autoworker and for the American worker: Your long economic nightmare will very soon be over,” Trump said. “Within two, three years, you’re not going to have auto workers in this. If they vote for Trump, we’re going to bring in factories at levels that you’ve never seen before. We’re going to get the auto workers’ jobs back like it was 30 years ago and 40 years ago before everybody left. We’re going to get it back at levels that you’ve never seen. …

“We’re going to bring back your car industry,” he continued. “We’re going to let them build plants, but they’re not building them in Mexico, they’re going to build them in the United States of America. And they’re going to be fired up by our autoworkers. And we’re going to bring them back in numbers that nobody can believe, and I can do it so easily. We were all set to do it, and then we had the COVID disaster come in.”

We can’t predict the future, but we can provide the facts on auto industry jobs.

Nationwide, motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs have been generally trending up — leaving the pandemic aside — since about 2010, after the administrations of President George W. Bush and Barack Obama provided federal assistance under the Troubled Asset Relief Program to save General Motors and Chrysler, which were facing bankruptcy.

In Georgia on Sept. 24, Trump left the misleading impression that this wasn’t the case, saying the auto industry “has been decimated by many decades of incompetent leadership both political and at your company.”

Over Obama’s entire eight-year term, starting in January 2009, motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs went up by 265,800 jobs, or 38.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The growth came after job losses during the 2007-2009 Great Recession and the implementation of TARP.

When Trump took office, there were 957,100 motor vehicle and parts jobs. In February 2020, before the pandemic hit, that figure was 29,700 higher. Two months later, the number of jobs had plummeted by 358,200. By the time Trump left office, most of those jobs had come back. He ended his term with a loss of 7,800 jobs in the industry.

Under Biden, the general upward trend has continued. Motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs have gone up by 128,800, or 13.6%. As of August, there were 1,078,100 jobs. In May, the industry hit the highest level of jobs since July 2006 and has remained above that threshold.

The peak for these jobs, dating back to 1990, was in June 2000, at 1,333,600 jobs. (The long-term peak was in the late 1970s, but the historical data can’t be directly compared with the more recent figures because of a change in industry classifications.)

Trump claimed that a growth in jobs or auto plants was set to happen when he was president, but then the COVID-19 pandemic struck. We asked the Trump campaign for support for his claim, but we haven’t received a response. The data on jobs don’t show evidence of a pending growth spurt.

In fact, before the pandemic, motor vehicle and parts jobs declined by 25,700 from January 2019, when those jobs hit their peak under Trump, to February 2020, before the economic fallout from the pandemic.

Belzowski, managing director of Automotive Futures, told us there’s no evidence that auto industry jobs were set to reach the levels of decades ago before the pandemic. Belzowski said the “only thing he could have done … while he was president, but he did not do it, was bring jobs back from Mexico.” Instead, the USMCA “kept jobs in Mexico.” U.S. automakers were in the country because of lower labor rates and to avoid emissions fines from the Environmental Protection Agency, he said.

Domestic auto production figures also run counter to the idea that the industry was about to return to the levels of decades ago before the pandemic. Production declined every year under Trump. It dropped again in Biden’s first year and increased slightly in 2022 and 2023, according to figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Domestic production has been on a steady decline over the last three decades, with the exception of growth during the first half or so of Obama’s time in office.

As for Michigan specifically, motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs went down under Trump, even before the pandemic.

Between January 2017, when Trump took office, and February 2020, before the pandemic caused job losses, motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs in Michigan had declined by 3,700, according to BLS data, with 1,800 of those job losses in vehicle manufacturing.

The pandemic then caused large job losses for a few months. Most of those jobs had been recovered by January 2021, when Trump left office, but over his entire term, the number of motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs in Michigan had dropped by 8,700, with the vast majority of that loss in parts manufacturing.

Under Biden’s presidency, motor vehicle manufacturing jobs in the state have gone up by 6,900, as of August, but parts manufacturing jobs have decreased by 7,400. So, altogether, manufacturing jobs in the industry in Michigan have dropped by 500.

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Quick Take

Following the arrest of music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs for sex trafficking and other charges, social media users — including former President Donald Trump — shared a digitally altered photo that purports to show Combs with Vice President Kamala Harris. The original image actually shows Harris with then-talk show host Montel Williams in 2001.

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Full Story

Rapper and record producer Sean Combs, also known by his stage name P. Diddy, was arrested in New York on Sept. 16 and charged with “racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution,” according to the indictment unsealed the following day. 

Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a Sept. 17 press conference, “The indictment alleges that between at least 2008 and the present, Combs abused, threatened, and coerced victims to fulfill his sexual desires, protect his reputation, and conceal his conduct.”

On Sept. 17, Combs pleaded not guilty to the charges. The following day, U.S. District Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr. denied Combs’ petition for bail.

Since his arrest, social media users have spread an altered photo to baselessly claim a relationship between Combs and Vice President Kamala Harris.

A Sept. 21 Facebook post shared a photo which appears to show Combs and Harris posing together, along with the caption, “P. DIDDY & KAMALA ‘hanging out’ back in the day. Wonder if any ‘Crazy Stuff’ was going on then?”

The photo was also shared to Instagram with the caption, “Could this be our next president. A picture speaks 1000 words.”

Former President Donald Trump reposted the photo on Truth Social on Sept. 20, where it was captioned, “Madam Vice President, have you ever been involved with or engaged in one of Puff Daddies freak offs?” The post was later deleted.

But the photo shared on social media has been digitally altered. The original photo, taken May 18, 2001, shows Harris with then-talk show host Montel Williams at that year’s Race to Erase Multiple Sclerosis gala. The photo appears in a file of images taken by photographer Ron Galella for Getty Images. In the altered image shared to social media, Williams’ face has been replaced with Combs’ face.

Williams tweeted in 2019 that he and Harris had dated 20 years earlier.

This is not the first time Harris has been falsely linked to an accused sex-trafficker. In December 2023, social media users shared a digitally altered photo that appears to show Harris with Jeffrey Epstein, as we wrote. The original photo shows Harris with her husband, Doug Emhoff.

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Sources

Faheid, Dalia, and Kara Scannell. “Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs to remain in custody after judge denies bail appeal in racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking case.” CNN. 18 Sep 2024.

Growcoot, Matt. “Trump Shares Doctored Photo of Kamala With Diddy Before Deleting It.” PetaPixel. 23 Sep 2024.

Hale Spencer, Saranac. “Posts Use Transposed Mugshot of Epstein to Target Kamala Harris.” FactCheck.org. 21 Dec 2024.

Jimmy Kimmel Live. “Trump WON’T STOP Pushing Pet Eating Lies, Oprah Surprises Audience and Clooney & Pitt Help Jimmy.” Video. YouTube. 17 Sep 2024.

Montel Williams @Montel_Williams. “@KamalaHarris and I briefly dated about 20 years ago when we were both single. So what? I have great respect for Sen. Harris. I have to wonder if the same stories about her dating history would have been written if she were a male candidate?” X. 7 Aug 2019.

Scannell, Kate, et al. “Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs to remain in custody after judge denies bail appeal in racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking case.” CNN. 18 Sep 2024.

“Sean Combs Arrest Press Conference.” Transcript. Rev. 18 Sep 2024.

“Sean Combs Charged In Manhattan Federal Court With Sex Trafficking And Other Federal Offenses.” Press Release. U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York. 17 Sep 2024.

Tolentino, Daysia. “Trump shares fake photo of Harris with Diddy in now-deleted Truth Social post.” NBC. 20 Sep 2024.

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