During The New York Times’ live chat updates of the event, writer Maggie Haberman wrote, “What’s striking about this debate is how relatively normal it feels, just as the Pence-Harris debate did four years ago and the Pence-Tim Kaine debate did four years before that. The debates that Trump participates in are unlike anything in modern U.S. political history.”
Absent from the nearly 2-hour debate moderated by CBS anchors Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan were the hyperbolic accusations and childish name-calling that have dominated recent presidential debates featuring former President Donald Trump. Regardless of the stately congeniality shared by the politicians, there was another unsavory element featured in most political debates that was present last night: lies, damn lies and statistics.
The U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Dallas, spent the evening in the Democrat’s spin room, ready to help get the Kamala Harris and Tim Walz message out. During the debate she tweeted out, “We mad about being fact checked huh?!” following a moment when the moderators pushed back against a Vance claim.
We mad about being fact checked huh?!
— Jasmine Crockett (@JasmineForUS) October 2, 2024
A number of outlets conducted live fact-checking as Walz and Vance sparred for the only time before the Nov. 5 election. We followed along as The New York Times and Politifact shed light and added context to the stances each candidate took as the night rolled on. As one would have safely predicted beforehand, each candidate issued their share of tall tales.
Here are the biggest whoppers told during the vice presidential debate.
Tiananmen Square Tim
According to The New York Times live fact-checking:Asked by a debate moderator on Tuesday why Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota had said that he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre in June of 1989, when he had in reality been in his home state of Nebraska, Mr. Walz said he was “a knucklehead at times.”
“All I said on this was, I got there that summer, and misspoke on this,” Mr. Walz added, when pressed to explain why he has maintained, for years, that he was in Hong Kong during the anti-government demonstration and entered China shortly afterward.
Mr. Walz tried to dismiss the misstatement as insignificant, saying he sometimes gets “caught up in the rhetoric.” He then pivoted to assert that his work as a teacher, congressman and governor was evidence that his community trusted his record despite his missteps.
Mr. Walz has long said that he was in Hong Kong on June 4, 1989, the day that Chinese soldiers killed hundreds of protesters in Tiananmen Square. He has said that he entered mainland China shortly after, even as others chose not to travel there, because he wanted to forge ahead with his yearlong teaching stint in the country — framing it as a courageous act.
“My thinking at the time was, what a golden opportunity to go tell, you know, how it was,” Mr. Walz told the podcast “Pod Save America” in February. “And I did have a lot of freedom to do that. Taught American history and could tell the story.”
But Mr. Walz was not in Hong Kong. He was in Nebraska until that August, when he left for China, according to news reports from the time. The timeline of his trip was first questioned by Minnesota Public Radio on Monday. His campaign did not provide an explanation.
Republicans have pounced on the news, pointing to it as another of a series of exaggerations and misstatements Mr. Walz has made, both large and small, that have surfaced since he was named Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate.
Those include a comment he made in 2018 about having “carried a weapon of war in war” as a member of the National Guard, when he never served in combat. He has also implied that he and his wife used in vitro fertilization to start their family. In fact, the couple used a different treatment, intrauterine insemination.
Open Borders Czar
According to Politifact’s live fact-checking:Harris did not let in 20-25 million undocumented immigrants [as Vance said in the debate].
This is False.
During Biden’s administration, immigration officials have encountered immigrants illegally crossing the U.S. border around 10 million times. When accounting for "got aways" — people who aren’t stopped by border officials — the number rises to about 11.6 million.
But encounters don’t mean admissions. Encounters represent events, so one person who tries to cross the border twice counts for two encounters. Also, not everyone encountered is let into the country. The Department of Homeland Security estimates about 4.2 million encounters have led to expulsions or removals.
About 3.9 million people have been released into the U.S. to await immigration court hearings under Biden’s administration, Department of Homeland Security data shows.
He Tried to Save it… by Trying to Kill It. Got it.
According to Politifact’s live fact-checking:No, Trump did not "salvage" the Affordable Care Act.
Vance's claim is False.
The Trump administration cut millions of dollars in marketing and enrollment aid for the law’s health plans and backed failed congressional and legal efforts to overturn the law. The Trump administration in June 2020 asked the Supreme Court to overturn the law in a case more than a dozen Republican-led states had brought; the high court rejected it.
Affordable Care Act enrollment declined by more than 2 million people during Trump’s presidency, and the number of uninsured Americans rose by 2.3 million, including 726,000 children, from 2016 to 2019, the U.S. Census Bureau reported; that includes three years of Trump’s presidency.
Where Is She Registered?
According to Politifact’s live fact-checking:Walz is wrong that Project 2025 calls for a "registry of pregnancies."
False.
Project 2025 recommends that states submit more detailed abortion reporting to the federal government. It calls for more information about how and when abortions took place, as well as other statistics for miscarriages and stillbirths.
The manual does not mention, nor call for, a new federal agency tasked with registering pregnant women.
They’re Killing Babies
According to Politifact’s live fact-checking:“The statute you signed into law, 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.”
— Senator JD Vance
This is false.
Mr. Vance is distorting Mr. Walz’s repeal of a so-called born alive law that had been in effect in Minnesota since the 1970s. That law required doctors to report when a “live child” was “born as the result of an abortion,” and to provide “all reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice” to care for that infant.
Doctors have argued to get rid of these laws because there are already laws requiring them to provide appropriate medical care to any human. And the extremely rare cases of infants who have been “born alive” were infants who were close to death. Doctors said the law took decision-making away from families, and forced them to do invasive procedures at the end of infants’ lives, taking them away from their parents in their dying moments.
In the five years that Mr. Walz has been governor, there have been eight recorded infants “born alive”: three were classified as “previable,” meaning they were unable to survive outside the uterus; two had fetal anomalies and died shortly after birth, and three were provided “comfort care as planned” and died shortly after birth. Comfort care is a kind of hospice care, which suggests that those infants were not expected to survive, and that doctors did, in fact, provide care they believed to be good medical practice.
