NPR fact checked the Vance-Walz vice presidential debate. Here's what we found

This story first appeared in the NPR Network's live blog of the 2024 vice presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz. For the latest on the campaign, head to NPR's Elections page.

Vice presidential candidates JD Vance and Tim Walz faced off onstage in New York Tuesday for what is the last scheduled debate of election season.

The tone was largely collegial — in contrast to much of the campaign so far — as the two Midwestern men tackled issues like the economy, immigration and health care.

NPR reporters fact-checked the candidates' claims in real time. Here's what they found:

Energy and Climate Change

VANCE: "If you believe [that carbon emissions drive climate change], what would you want to do? The answer is that you'd want to restore as much American manufacturing as possible, and you'd want to produce as much energy as possible in the United States of America ... Unfortunately, Kamala Harris has done exactly the opposite.

Under the Biden-Harris administration, the U.S. produced a record amount of oil last year — averaging 12.9 million barrels per day. That eclipsed the previous record of 12.3 million barrels per day, set under former President Donald Trump in 2019.

Last year was also a record year for domestic production of natural gas. Much of the domestic boom in oil and gas production is the result of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” techniques. While campaigning for president in 2019, Kamala Harris said she would ban fracking, but she changed course when she joined the Biden administration.

In addition to record oil and gas production, the Biden-Harris administration has also coincided with rapid growth of solar and wind power. Meanwhile, coal has declined as a source of electricity.

— NPR economics correspondent Scott Horsley

Watch NPR's post-debate analysis, with Asma Khalid, Susan Davis, Tamara Keith and Stephen Fowler.

MODERATOR: "[Gov. Walz] mentioned that President Trump has called climate change a hoax. Do you agree? "

VANCE: "Look, what the president has said is that if the Democrats, in particular Kamala Harris and her leadership, if they really believe that climate change is serious, what they would be doing is more manufacturing and more energy production in the United States of America, and that's not what they're doing."

VANCE: "I've noticed some of our Democratic friends talking a lot about ... this idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change. Let's just say that's true, just for the sake of argument."

Former President Trump has, in fact, repeatedly called climate change a hoax and made light of its effects.

His rhetoric on climate change has shifted over the years, with the former president at times saying he believed the issue was real but did not know if it was driven by human activity.

Scientists agree that the climate is changing, and that change is being driven by human activity, specifically burning fossil fuels which increases carbon emissions.

— NPR producer Lexie Schapitl

Immigration

VANCE: "And then I think you make it harder for illegal aliens to undercut the wages of American workers. A lot of people will go home if they can't work for less than minimum wage in our own country, and by the way, that will be really good for our workers who just want to earn a fair wage for doing a good day's work."

As the vice presidential candidates discuss how to address concerns over immigration, increased migration — both legal and illegal — has helped to grow the labor force in recent years, allowing employers to keep adding jobs at a rapid clip without putting much upward pressure on prices.

Over the last 12 months, for example, the foreign-born workforce has grown by nearly 1.5 million people while the native-born workforce has shrunk by 768,000 people — mostly due to retirements, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Were it not for the influx of immigrant workers, the U.S. economy would likely be shrinking.

They do not appear to be displacing native-born workers.

The share of working-age men who were in the workforce in August was 89.5% — higher than all but one month during the Trump administration. The share of working-age women who were in the workforce last month was the highest ever — 78.4%.

— NPR economics correspondent Scott Horsley

VANCE: "A lot of fentanyl is coming into our country ... Kamala Harris let fentanyl into our communities at record levels."

Once again we heard that undocumented immigrants are bringing fentanyl into the country — a myth which has been debunked.

In reality, close to 90% of illicit fentanyl is seized at official border crossings. Immigration authorities say nearly all of that is smuggled by people who are legally authorized to cross the border, and more than half by U.S. citizens. Virtually none is seized from migrants seeking asylum.

Also, NPR has reported that the U.S. is currently seeing significantly less fentanyl in circulation and fewer overdoses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that fentanyl-related deaths dropped by roughly 10% last year.

— NPR immigration correspondent Jasmine Garsd

Taxes

VANCE: "If you look at what was so different about Donald Trump's tax cuts, even from previous Republican tax cut plans, is that a lot of those resources went to giving more take-home pay to middle-class and working-class Americans. It was passed in 2017 and you saw an American economic boom unlike we've seen in a generation this country."

Despite Trump’s frequent claims to the contrary, the 2017 tax cut was not the largest in U.S. history. However, it was big enough to blow a large hole in the federal budget. Tax revenues as a share of GDP dropped to 16.3% in the year after the tax cut was passed, down from 17.1% the year before and an average of 17.7% over the past 40 years. Even though federal spending also declined as a share of GDP in 2018, the deficit topped $785 billion that year, and approached a trillion dollars in 2019 — the year before the pandemic.

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, more than half the savings from the 2017 tax cut went to the top 10% of earners, and more than a quarter went to the top 1%.

Large parts of the 2017 tax cut are due to expire next year. Trump has proposed extending all of them, while also calling for an additional cut in the corporate tax rate. Harris has proposed extending the tax cuts for everyone making less than $400,000 a year (97% of the population) while raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

While Harris’ tax proposals are similar to those made by President Biden, her plan differs from the president’s in some respects. For example, she called for a 28% tax on millionaires’ investment income — which is lower than the 39.6% rate Biden has proposed.

Under the Biden-Harris administration, the IRS has also beefed up tax enforcement to ensure that wealthier people and businesses pay what they owe. GOP lawmakers have criticized that effort, and it could be reversed in a second Trump administration.

— NPR economics correspondent Scott Horsley

Health care

VANCE: "I think you can make a really good argument that [Trump] salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came about. ... Donald Trump could have destroyed the program — instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care."

During his presidency, Trump undermined the Affordable Care Act in many ways — for instance, by slashing funding for advertising and free "navigators" who help people sign up for a health insurance plan on HealthCare.gov. And rather than deciding to "save" the ACA, he tried hard to get Congress to repeal it, and failed.

The Biden administration has reversed course from Trump's management of the Affordable Care Act. Increased subsidies have made premiums more affordable in the marketplaces, and enrollment has surged. The uninsurance rate has dropped to its lowest point ever during the Biden administration.

The Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010 and is entrenched in the health care system. Republicans successfully ran against Obamacare for about a decade, but it has faded as a campaign issue this year.

— NPR health policy correspondent Selena Simmons-Duffin

MODERATOR: "Senator, you have not yet explained how you would protect people with preexisting conditions or laid out that plan."

JD VANCE: "Look, we currently have laws and regulations in place right now that protect people with preexisting conditions. We want to keep those regulations in place, but we also want to make the health insurance marketplace function a little bit better."

Vance was asked about comments he's made recently, trying to fill in the details of Trump’s comments during the presidential debate that he had the “concepts of a plan” when it comes to replacing the Affordable Care Act. (The Harris-Walz campaign needled the Republican ticket ahead of the debate about not having anything clearer to say on health policy.)

But when Vance refers to "laws and regulations in place" protecting people with preexisting conditions, those laws and regulations are the Affordable Care Act.

For context: Before the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies could deny coverage or charge higher premiums when people had “preexisting conditions,” which could be anything from diabetes or cancer to acne or back problems. The ACA made that illegal, and now everyone has to be covered and their premiums are based on their income, not how healthy they are.

Risk pools previously could essentially sort people into a “healthy” bucket, where you pay less for a health plan, and “sick” bucket, where you pay more or can’t get coverage at all. The ACA requires insurance companies to take all people into the risk pool.

Health policy experts across the political spectrum say it's a terrible idea to go back to pre-ACA policies.

Of Vance’s idea, conservative health policy expert Joe Antos told Roll Call last week, it “doesn’t make any sense,” adding, “you need some healthy people in there with some sick people, otherwise you’re going to have a financially unsustainable system.”

Cynthia Cox of KFF, a nonpartisan research group, tweeted a thread enumerating how perilous things were when insurance companies could consider your “preexisting conditions” when deciding what coverage to offer you, if any.

“Cops, firefighters, miners, offshore drillers and pro athletes were denied plans,” she wrote, because their jobs made some insurers think they were too risky to cover. And if your kid had more than three ear infections in the previous year, that could be grounds for denial, too.

— NPR health policy correspondent Selena Simmons-Duffin

Guns

VANCE: "Thanks to Kamala Harris' open border, we've seen a massive influx in the number of illegal guns run by the Mexican drug cartel."

Actually, there is long-standing evidence showing the gun smuggling route is going in the opposite direction.

Most recently, the Mexican Attorney General of the Republic and the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) made an effort to trace the origin and number of firearms in Mexico coming from or through the United States. Mexico’s Secretariat of Foreign Relations found that 70-90% of traced firearms originated from and passed through the U.S. The ATF and U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated a lower rate of 68%.

— NPR immigration correspondent Jasmine Garsd

VANCE: "Another driver of the gun violence epidemic ... is the terrible gun violence problem in a lot of our big cities, and this is why we have to empower law enforcement to arrest the bad guys, put them away, and take gun offenders off the streets."

Of course, crime rates vary by city, but overall across the country, violent crime dropped nationwide in 2023, with murder falling by around 10% from the year before, according to data released just last week from the FBI. More than 16,000 law enforcement agencies sent their crime data to the FBI, covering around 94% of the country’s population.

This year-end data, released each fall by the FBI, is the most complete look at national crime rates we have, but it is a little dated. Still, according to preliminary FBI data, violent crime has continued to drop nationwide in the first half of 2024 compared to the first half of 2023.

Data from other researchers also mirror those results. Some crime analysts say it's likely that violent crime rates will fall below pre-pandemic levels by the end of the year.

— NPR criminal justice reporter Meg Anderson

China

MODERATOR: "Governor, you said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protests 1989, but Minnesota Public Radio and other media outlets are reporting that you actually didn't travel to Asia until August of that year. Can you explain that discrepancy?"

WALZ: "I've not been perfect, and I'm a knucklehead at times ... I got there that summer and misspoke on this."

Walz has a long relationship with China and claimed he’d been there “about 30” or “dozens” of times, but after APM Reports questioned how that was possible, his campaign acknowledged the real number of trips from the U.S. to China was “closer to 15.”

Walz lived in China for about a year, teaching in the southern city of Foshan. His stint with the nonprofit organization WorldTeach started in the summer of 1989, just two months after the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Starting in 1993, he led annual summer trips to China for students in the Nebraska and Minnesota high schools where he taught.

Walz also once described being in Hong Kong in May 1989, during the student uprising that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre, the reporting from APM Reports notes — an assertion that is belied by newspaper accounts at the time.

— Minnesota Public Radio's Clay Masters