In their efforts to supplement the candidates at the top of their tickets, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota has played offense for the Harris campaign while Senator JD Vance of Ohio has sought to explain former President Donald J. Trump’s incendiary comments and criticized proposals.
To defend the Trump campaign’s baseless claims about Haitian migrants, Mr. Trump’s contradictory promises about health care and his proposals to impose sweeping tariffs, Mr. Vance has made specious assertions.
And in a bid to undercut his Republican opponents, Mr. Walz has taken Mr. Vance’s and Mr. Trump’s remarks out of context, and hyperbolically described elements of a conservative policy agenda known as Project 2025.
Before they meet on the debate stage on Tuesday night, here’s a fact check of some of the claims the vice-presidential candidates have made on the campaign trail:
Mr. Vance has falsely described Haitian migrants’ immigration status and their impact on crime.
What Was Said
“The 20,000 Haitian migrants who come to Springfield are part of hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants, part of 25 million illegal aliens in this country. Now, when the media says that people are here legally, here’s what they mean. That Kamala Harris has granted mass amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. Now, I happen to think that what Kamala Harris has done is not just wrong, it is illegal.”
— Mr. Vance in a rally in Pennsylvania in September
“Murders are up by 81 percent because of what Kamala Harris has allowed to happen to this small community.”
— Mr. Vance in an CNN interview in September
False. Questioned over baseless claims that he and Mr. Trump have made about Haitian migrants in an Ohio city, Mr. Vance has instead questioned their legal status and supposed impact on crime in the city.
Some 12,000 to 20,000 Haitians live in Springfield, Ohio, according to officials. Most are there legally, including some longtime residents with green cards. Others have been granted temporary protected status, and others entered the country through a program known as humanitarian parole. But contrary to Mr. Vance’s claims, neither of those routes to being in Springfield is illegal.
A 1990 law gave the executive branch the authority to give migrants from certain countries facing unrest or environmental disaster temporary protected status, shielding them from deportation and providing temporary work authorization.
The Trump administration terminated the designation for Haiti and five other countries — effectively ending it for 98 percent of people who held the status at the time — but extended it for four others. The Biden administration rescinded those terminations and added a handful of other countries, including Ukraine and Venezuela. As of March, more than 800,000 people from 16 countries were protected under the designation.
Similarly, a 1952 immigration law has allowed the executive branch to “parole into the United States temporarily” migrants for emergency reasons, and most presidential administrations since then have issued parole orders. A judge in March upheld the Biden administration’s use of the program to permit the entry of hundreds of thousands of citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, after Texas and Republican-led states sued to block it.
And the 81 percent figure Mr. Vance mentions is misleading; it refers to an increase from five homicides in Springfield in 2021 to nine murders in 2023, according to an Ohio crime dashboard. But that was cherry-picked, and more expansive data shows no clear pattern in the annual number of homicides in Springfield. The figure has generally remained low and hovered between zero and 13 over the past four decades.
With such small numbers, any variation can produce seemingly large statistical changes when analyzed. So by Mr. Vance’s logic, homicides increased 160 percent in Springfield during the first half of Mr. Trump’s term — even though the actual numbers went from five in 2016 to 13 in 2018.
Mr. Vance falsely portrayed Mr. Trump as a defender of the Affordable Care Act and wrongly claimed a lack of economic consensus over tariffs.
What Was Said
“He could’ve destroyed the program, or he could actually build upon it and make it better so that Americans didn’t lose a lot of health care. He chose to build upon a plan even though it came from his Democratic predecessor.”
— Mr. Vance in an NBC interview in September
False. Even after the Senate tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the Trump administration continued to take actions that weakened the health care law. Enrollment also declined under the Trump administration, contrary to Mr. Vance’s claim that Americans did not lose health care.
The New York Times has previously detailed several ways in which the Trump administration undermined the Affordable Care Act. Those include limiting outreach and advertising, allowing the sale of cheaper plans with fewer benefits and reducing subsidies to insurance companies for low-income enrollees.
The Trump administration also said it would stop defending crucial parts of the health care law in court in 2018, and said it believed that the law was unconstitutional in 2019.
Under the Trump administration, the number of enrollees declined to 11.4 million in 2020, from 12.7 million in 2016.
What Was Said
“I think economists really disagree about the effects of tariffs.”
— Mr. Vance in an NBC interview in August
False. There is broad agreement, not debate, among economists about the effect of tariffs.
In 30 years of surveys to thousands of economists belonging to the American Economics Association, including most recently in 2021, 95 percent of respondents have repeatedly agreed that tariffs “generally reduce economic welfare.”
And 95 percent of economists surveyed by the University of Chicago in September agreed that a substantial portion of the tariffs’ costs are “borne by consumers of the country that enacts the tariffs, through price increases.”
A 2022 assessment of existing research in the Annual Review of Economics on the impact of Mr. Trump’s trade war with China concluded that American “consumers of imported goods have borne the brunt of the tariffs through higher prices, and that the trade war has lowered aggregate real income in both the United States and China.”
There are economists who agree with the Trump campaign’s view that tariffs can confer benefits that outweigh the costs. But that is not a widely shared view.
Mr. Walz has overstated elements of Project 2025.
What Was Said
“They made it easy for us to know what they’re going to do, because they wrote it in a 900-page document called Project 2025. I keep asking this, ‘Who is asking for that agenda?’… Nobody’s sitting around the bars in Grand Rapids saying, ‘You know, the first thing we need to do, is we need to ban George Orwell’s books.’”
— Mr. Walz in a Michigan rally in September
This needs context. Project 2025 is a set of conservative policy proposals by a Washington think tank. It makes no direct mention of banning books, but some say its proposals would facilitate bans and censorship.
Project 2025’s foreword argues that pornography should be outlawed and that “educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.” It also says that “noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country.”
In the chapter on education, Project 2025 also proposes adding prohibitions on “compelled speech” to federal and state civil rights laws and enshrining “parental rights.”
PEN America, a nonprofit that promotes freedom of expression, has argued that such proposals have led to censorship and book bans in many school districts. For example, books that grapple with gender identity or sexuality or include sexual content — like George Orwell’s “1984” — have been labeled pornographic and thus banned.
What Was Said
“Trump is trying to create this new government entity that will monitor all pregnancies to enforce their abortion bans.”
— Mr. Walz in a rally in North Carolina in September
False. Mr. Walz was once again referring to Project 2025, which was not created by the Trump campaign. Moreover, Project 2025 does not specifically call for pregnancies to be monitored by a new government entity, though it does call for existing federal agencies to collect more accurate data about abortion.
Project 2025 has nearly 200 mentions of abortion, as well as numerous proposals to discourage it. The closest measure to Mr. Walz’s description includes a call for the Health and Human Services Department to “use every available tool, including the cutting of funds,” to collect data from states about abortions performed within their borders. (Data reporting is currently voluntary.) And as part of that data collection, Project 2025 says, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should “require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion.”
Project 2025 did not come from Mr. Trump or his campaign, and they have both sought to distance themselves from the group’s agenda. But there are many overlaps in both policy and personnel between the project and the Trump campaign.
Mr. Walz has also taken his opponents’ remarks out of context.
What Was Said
“After one of these mass shootings, Donald Trump said people need to know how to get over it and my opponent said it is just a fact of life.”
— Mr. Walz in an rally in Pennsylvania in September
This needs context. Mr. Walz omits parts of Mr. Trump’s comments, and Mr. Vance’s remarks may give a different impression.
Responding to a school shooting in January, Mr. Trump said, “I want to send our support and our deepest sympathies to the victims and families touched by the terrible school shooting yesterday in Perry, Iowa.”
“It’s just terrible,” he continued. “So surprising to see it here. But, we have to get over it. We have to move forward. We have to move forward. But, to the relatives and to all of the people that are so devastated right now, to a point they can’t breathe, they can’t live, we are with you all the way. We’re with you and we love you and cherish you.”
And responding to a shooting in Georgia Mr. Vance said: “I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools.”
What Was Said
“He said, ‘Well, they reduced interest rates this week, how terrible is that?’ and he got the crowd booing.’”
— Mr. Walz at the Pennsylvania rally
False. Mr. Walz was referring to Mr. Vance, who at a recent rally in North Carolina, was asked for his reaction after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates in September. Before he responded, the crowd began booing. Mr. Vance did not say the rate cut was terrible, but said it was a “little relief” that still was inadequate.
“The Fed cut the interest rate today by half a percentage point — going to alleviate inflation for a lot of people, so if you have any reaction to that, we’d love it,” a reporter asked, eliciting boos from the crowd.
After a few seconds, Mr. Vance responded: “A half a point is nothing compared to what American families have been dealing with for the last three years. When Donald Trump left office, a lot of Americans were getting 3, 4 percent mortgages. Now they’re getting 8 percent mortgages. A half a point is not going to help those families a whole lot. It’s better than nothing.”
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