FactChecking Round Two of the Democratic Debate

Summary

The second group of 10 Democratic presidential candidates made false and misleading claims about immigration, gun control legislation and the environment, and repeated familiar talking points on taxes, health care and poverty.

• Former Vice President Joe Biden falsely claimed President Trump “immediately discontinued” an aid program to Central America, and implied that’s the cause of surging immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border. The aid was reduced about 23 percent during Trump’s first two years.
• Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Sen. Bernie Sanders both alluded to a deadline for climate change, but scientists say it’s the wrong way of thinking about it.
• Sanders repeated an old, misleading claim that 83% of the benefits from the Republican tax law go to the top 1% of income earners. That won’t be true until 2027, when most of the individual income tax changes expire unless Congress extends them.
• Pushing back against Trump’s claims that the economy is doing great, Sen. Kamala Harris said, “Well yeah people in America are working — they’re working two and three jobs.” The percentage of American workers holding multiple jobs is 5 percent and is virtually unchanged from when Trump took office.
• Biden accused Harris of “a mischaracterization of my position across the board” after she confronted him on his past opposition to school busing and his recent comments about working with “some civility” in the 1970s with two segregationist southern Democrats. Both candidates have a point.
• California Rep. Eric Swalwell said he was “the only person on this stage who has voted and passed background checks.” That’s false. A campaign spokesperson said he was referring to “universal background checks,” but even that claim is misleading.
• Hickenlooper said, inaccurately, that the Green New Deal promises every American a government job. The nonbinding resolution guarantees a job, but not necessarily one in government.
• Sanders claimed that Trump tried to “throw 32 million people off their health care that they have,” a figure that includes people who would choose to no longer purchase insurance if Congress repealed the Affordable Care Act without replacing it.
• Sanders repeated an erroneous claim from his 2016 presidential campaign that the U.S. has the “highest rate of childhood poverty.” While the country does have a high relative child poverty rate, several