Fact-checking claims made in Vance-Walz debate

With only 34 days until the 2024 presidential election, vice presidential candidates Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democrat, and Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican, squared off Tuesday night on the debate stage.

CBS News hosted the vice presidential debate in New York City, with “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell and “Face the Nation” chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan moderating.

Walz, Kamala Harris’ running mate, and Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, are both relatively new to the political limelight.

Walz, 60, a high school social studies teacher, was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives by Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District in 2006. After six terms in the House, Walz was elected in 2018 as Minnesota governor.

Vance, 40, a lawyer and venture capitalist, won his Senate election in 2022 after his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” became a New York Times bestseller.

The candidates’ microphones were live during most of the debate, but moderators did exercise the right to mute the microphones at their discretion.

The Vance-Walz encounter was expected to be the last major debate of the 2024 presidential election campaign.

Solar Panels Made in China, Vance Says
Vance criticized the Harris-Walz plan for remedying climate change with solar panels.

“The issue is that if you’re spending hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars of American taxpayer money on solar panels that are made in China,” Vance said, “number one, you’re going to make the economy dirtier.”

Vance said we should be making more solar panels in the United States, noting that the components are made overseas in China.

Vance is correct, according to Erin Walsh, senior research fellow for international affairs in The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center.

The development of solar energy began in America, then the Chinese developed it further, and now China controls the “entire supply chain, so you can’t be involved unless you’re purchasing some goods from China to make your solar panels,” Walsh said.

China has “taken advantage of the United States, because we’ve had this very driven climate agenda,” she said.

The more the U.S. and other nations move toward use of wind and solar energy, as well as electric vehicles, the more China’s economy benefits and the more America’s economy and national security are put at risk, according to Walsh.

Vance’s statement came after Walz bragged that the largest solar manufacturing plant in North America is in Minnesota. Last month, the Biden-Harris administration announced $40 million in investments across the solar energy supply chain.

‘Scientists Say Climate Change Makes These Hurricanes Larger’
O’Donnell, one of the two CBS moderators, used the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina to ask the two vice presidential candidates about climate change.

“More than 160 people are dead, and hundreds more are missing,” O’Donnell said. “Scientists say climate change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger, and more deadly because of the historic rainfall.”

Although climate change theoretically may affect hurricanes, the concrete claim that burning fossil fuels has made hurricanes worse doesn’t measure up. In fact, hurricanes should get worse if the climate grows colder, not warmer.

“[If] we have colder periods, we will get more hurricane activity,” climatologist David Legates told “The Daily Signal Podcast” in June. “If we have warmer periods, the hurricane activity tends to drop off.”

Legates, a visiting fellow for the Science Advisory Committee in the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at The Heritage Foundation, is a professor emeritus at the University of Delaware. He cowrote the book “Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism.”

Legates pointed to a graph showing that global hurricanes have remained within the same general range for the past 50 years, without a clear trend of higher or lower power.

320,000 Missing Migrant Children
“We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost,” Vance said, adding of these children: “some of them have been sex-trafficked.”

In August, the Inspector General’s Office of the Department of Homeland Security announced that 320,000 migrant children could not be located within the U.S.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency known as ICE, “must take immediate action to ensure the safety of [unaccompanied migrant children] residing in the United States,” the report says.

“Based on our audit work and according to ICE officials, [unaccompanied children] who do not appear for court are considered at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor,” the inspector general’s report says.

When minor children cross the border alone, they remain in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Refugee Resettlement until placed with a parent or sponsor. However, the HHS agency doesn’t track the location of each child after he or she is released to a sponsor.

In February 2023, The New York Times reported that the Department of Health and Human Services “checks on all minors by calling them a month after they begin living with their sponsors,” but that data obtained by the newspaper “showed that over the last two years, the agency could not reach more than 85,000 children.”

Project 2025’s Registry of Pregnancy
Walz said that Project 2025, the presidential transition plan developed by The Heritage Foundation and 100 coalition partners, calls for a national registry to monitor women’s pregnancies.

However, legacy media outlets including CBS News fact-checked this claim as false.

Project 2025’s 900-page “Mandate for Leadership” does call for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to collect certain information from states—namely information on the number and method of abortions, the reason for an abortion, how far along in pregnancy each abortion was, and the pregnant woman’s state of residence.

However, there is no evidence that Project 2025 ever called for a federal registry of pregnancies.

Trump also has repeatedly stated that he has not read “Mandate for Leadership” and has not endorsed Project 2025.

Walz: Measure He Signed Doesn’t Allow Abortion in Ninth Month
Walz said the abortion bill he signed into law in Minnesota doesn’t allow abortion up to birth, as Trump has said.

In his Sept. 10 debate with Harris, Trump said that her  “vice presidential pick 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,” Trump said. “And that’s not OK with me, hence the vote.”

Walz said the bill he signed did no such thing. However, in January 2023, the governor signed into law a bill that included no limitations on when a woman may end the life of her unborn baby.

In May 2023, Walz also removed a Minnesota requirement that measures be taken to preserve the “life and health” of a baby born alive after a failed abortion, replacing it with a nebulous requirement for “care.”

Due to efforts by Walz, who became governor in 2019, Minnesota no longer keeps track of so-called born-alive survivors of abortion.

Walz Blames Abortion Ban for Death of Amber Thurman
Walz said a woman named Amber Nicole Thurman died because she had to travel out of Georgia, her home state, to get an abortion because of a ban on the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy.

He said Thurman had to “drive 600 miles to try and get health care,” leading to her death.

As documented in a ProPublica article, however, Thurman suffered a known complication of an abortion drug during which her body failed to expel the tissue of her dead unborn baby after the pills ended its life.

She drove to North Carolina for a surgical procedure called dilation and curettage, or D&C, which involves removing a fetus or other material from the uterus. After she got there, she had to wait 20 hours for the hospital to operate on her, which turned out to be too late to save her life.

However, Thurman’s travel to North Carolina wasn’t necessary. Georgia law, as well as every other law in the United States limiting abortion, includes an exception to save the life of the mother.

Additionally, the Georgia law limiting abortion explicitly states that a D&C to remove an unborn child that has died is not a “felony” or “criminalized” in the state.

Thurman could have legally gotten the procedure in Georgia had she gone to a local hospital rather than one in North Carolina.

‘Rich as Hell’ Got a Tax Cut
Walz repeated Democrats’ assertion that the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed into law, benefited only the wealthy.

“There is a philosophical difference between us. Donald Trump made a promise, and I’ll give you this, he kept it,” Walz said. “He took folks to Mar-a-Lago and said, ‘You’re as rich as hell, I’ll give you a tax cut.’ He gave a tax cut that predominantly went to the top class. What happened there was a trillion-dollar increase in the debt.”

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed by Congress gave 82% of middle-income earners a tax cut averaging $1,050, according to FactCheck.org.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, appointed by President Joe Biden, has acknowledged that the Trump tax cuts actually cut taxes for all.

The year following passage of the TCJA, new job openings surged. About 83,000 more Americans voluntarily left their jobs for better opportunities at the end of 2019, compared with the trend before the Trump tax cuts.

The Daily Signal has reported that the labor market improved after Congress passed the bill.

The tax cuts were largest for the lowest-income Americans and smallest for the top 1% of earners, Heritage Foundation analysts noted. Heritage’s calculations also found that the top 1% paid more in taxes after passage of the bill.

Has Harris Demonstrated How to Curb Gun Violence Constitutionally?
There are ways to remedy mass shootings and other gun violence without threatening Second Amendment rights, Walz argued.

“It’s not infringing on your Second Amendment [rights], and the idea to have some of these weapons out there, it just doesn’t make any sense,” Walz said. “Kamala Harris, as an attorney general, worked on this issue.”

However, as San Francisco’s district attorney before she was attorney general of California, Harris said authorities could “walk into” legal gun owners’ homes to inspect whether they were storing their firearms properly.

“We’re going to require responsible behaviors among everybody in the community, and just because you legally possess a gun in the sanctity of your locked home doesn’t mean that we’re not going to walk into that home and check to see if you’re being responsible and safe in the way you conduct your affairs,” Harris said in May 2007.

Still, Walz said during the debate: “No one’s trying to scaremonger and say, ‘We’re taking your guns.’”

In 2019, running for president before she dropped out ahead of the Iowa caucuses, Harris also said she supported a mandatory gun-buyback program.

“I do believe that we need to do buyback,” Harris said.

“A buyback program is a good idea,” she said. “Now we need to do it the right way. And part of that has to be, you know, buy back [guns] and give people their value, the financial value.”

‘Largest Decrease in Opioid Deaths’
Vance and Walz agreed that fentanyl deaths are a tragedy in America, before Walz argued that “the good news on this is the last 12 months saw the largest decrease in opioid deaths in our nation’s history.”

Deaths from opioid overdoses jumped significantly during the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic and remain higher than pre-pandemic levels.

In 2017, over 47,000 Americans overdosed on or were poisoned by opioids, officials say. This number jumped to over 68,000 in 2020 and over 81,000 in 2022.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in August that drug overdose deaths are declining.

“It is important to note that flat or declining numbers of drug overdose deaths (either reported or predicted) could be due to incomplete data, true decreases in the number of deaths, or a combination of the two,” the CDC said.

KFF, a nonprofit health policy research group formerly called The Kaiser Family Foundation, reports:  “In the second half of 2023, opioid overdose deaths began to decline and continued to fall through the end of the year. In July 2023, deaths were 2% lower than in July 2022, and by December, they were 20% lower compared to December 2022.”

Haitian Migrants Have ‘Legal Status’
The tens of thousands of Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who recently made national news have “legal status or temporary protected status,” debate moderator Brennan said at one point.

Vance quickly interjected to “fact-check” Brennan, explaining that many illegal immigrants use the Biden-Harris administration’s CBP One mobile application to “apply for asylum and apply for parole and be granted [it],” adding that this is “not a person coming in, applying for a green card.” 

“The Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, are in various immigration statuses,” according to Simon Hankinson, senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation.

Although a “small number” of Haitian migrants may fall under legal resident status, Hankinson said in an email to The Daily Signal, the majority fall into one of three categories:

1. Recipients of Temporary Protected Status, which the president can assign to nationals of designated countries for (supposedly) temporary periods if wars, natural disasters, or other one-off events render their country incapable for a time of reabsorbing them.
2. Those who arrived illegally between ports of entry … but [are] soon released with a Notice to Appear in immigration court in a lengthy process to deport (“remove”) them.
3. Those paroled in via the Biden administration’s highly disputed, and arguably unconstitutional, [parole for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans] or CBP One programs.

Referring to anyone in these three categories as “‘legal immigrants’ is wrong,” Hankinson told The Daily Signal, despite what Springfield officials say on the city website.

No ‘Major Conflict’ Began Under Trump
“When was the last time—I’m 40 years old—when was the last time that an American president didn’t have a major conflict break out?” Vance asked. “The only answer is during the four years that Donald Trump was president.”

This claim is largely true.

Reuters fact-checked a similar claim—that Trump was the only president in modern American history not to start a new war. When considering the beginning of major wars, such as the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War, Reuters listed Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan over the past 40 years.

Yet when factoring in military operations such as the U.S. intervention in Libya under Obama, troops sent to Haiti and the Balkans under Clinton, and Reagan’s deployment of troops in Lebanon and Grenada, Trump becomes the only president in the past 40 years not to preside over a new intervention—considering Trump’s strike on military targets in Syria as an extension of a conflict that began under Obama.

On ‘Fire!’ and Facebook Censorship
When Vance spoke about the Biden-Harris administration’s encouraging Facebook to censor information related to COVID-19, Walz cited the well-known exception to free speech as protected by the First Amendment: yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

“You guys wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers shouldn’t wear masks,” Vance replied to Walz. “That isn’t yelling ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, that is criticizing the policies of the government, which is the right of every American.”

Walz replied, “I don’t run Facebook.”

Although the Minnesota governor doesn’t run Facebook, the Biden-Harris administration notoriously pressured Facebook and other Big Tech companies to suppress content that conflicted with the government’s narrative on COVID-19 restrictions and vaccines.

After entrepreneur Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, he handed over many internal documents to journalists, including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss. Those “Twitter Files” revealed how the Biden White House threatened Big Tech companies with government action should they fail to suppress information conflicting with the government’s narrative.

The White House also pressured Facebook to suppress or remove content. Facebook admitted to the White House that it suppressed “often true content” on vaccines, even posts where a person shared personal negative experiences as the result of a COVID-19 vaccine.

Masking rules for toddlers doesn’t appear in internal communications published so far, but Vance’s argument that the Biden-Harris administration supported Big Tech censorship on COVID-19 is solid.

Ken McIntyre contributed to this report, which was updated through Tuesday night.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]

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