Fact check: Walz and Vance made questionable claims during only VP debate

Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. JD Vance squared off Tuesday in the only vice presidential debate of the 2024 election and made plenty of questionable statements. The mostly cordial debate hosted by CBS in New York City was moderated by journalists Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, who briefly cut the candidates’ microphones at one point during a discussion of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

Here’s a closer look at some of their claims:

Pregnancy registry claim

“Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” Walz said.

Democrats have repeatedly criticized Project 2025, a more than 900-page plan written by the conservative Heritage Foundation, as a guideline for a prospective second Donald Trump administration.

The plan mentions abortion 199 times and pregnancy more than 30 times and says states could lose federal funding without better recordkeeping on abortions. According to FactCheck.org, Project 2025 would make it mandatory for states to report abortions and miscarriages — but not pregnancies — to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC has been collecting anonymous data about legal induced abortions since 1969. States are not currently required to report abortion data to the CDC, but most of them already do.

It doesn’t call for an agency tasked with registering pregnancies.

Walz ‘misspoke’ on time period he was in Hong Kong

Moderator Brennan: “You said you were in Hong Kong during the deadly Tiananmen Square protest in the spring of 1989.”

Walz admitted Tuesday that he misspoke about the timeframe he was in Hong Kong after having long maintained he was there leading up to and during the deadly June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre.

“I got there that summer and misspoke on this,” Walz said when pressed to explain the discrepancy in his timeline during the debate. “I was in Hong Kong, in China, during the democracy protests.”

Walz previously said he was in Hong Kong in May 1989 before the massacre, MPR News reported. He also said he was in Hong Kong the day the massacre happened during a 2019 radio interview, CNN reported.

However, a photo taken on May 16, 1989, put him in the United States working at the National Guard Armory in Alliance, Nebraska, MPR reported. And a story published in a Nebraska newspaper on Aug. 11, 1989, quoted him as saying he would leave for China that Sunday, more than two months after the Tiananmen Square massacre.

“To watch what happened at the end of the day on June 4 was something that many of us will never forget, we pledge to never forget, and bearing witness and accurate telling of history is absolutely crucial for any nation to move forward,” Walz said during a 2009 congressional hearing to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the massacre.

Walz has also misstated the number of times he’s visited China. The campaign previously said he visited the country more than 30 times. However, MPR reported the campaign now says he was there closer to 15 times.

The discrepancy in Walz’s timeline comes as Republicans have been raising questions about whether Walz’s ties to the country, which has become one of the United States’ top adversaries, is influencing his decisionmaking. The GOP-led House Oversight Committee has launched an investigation into his time there and has asked both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security via a subpoena for any relevant information the agencies have on Walz.

Shooting witnessed by his son and viral ‘friends with school shooters’ moment

“I got a 17-year-old and he witnessed a shooting at a community center playing volleyball,” Walz told the country about his son, Gus. “Those things don’t leave you.”

Walz was referring to a January 2023 shooting at the Jimmy Lee Recreation Center in St. Paul. David Albornoz, a St. Paul Parks aquatics supervisor and coach who is close to Gus Walz, later recounted some of the details of the shooting in a Facebook post in late August after the teen’s emotional viral moment at the Democratic National Convention, when he tearfully cheered on his dad.

“I also know him from when a kid got shot in the parking lot and he helped keeping everyone safe and calm, looking after the kids in the gym with us as I rushed out,” Albornoz said in the post.

Following the debate, the campaign confirmed Gus Walz was there.

While still on the topic of gun control, Walz also said during the debate he had “become friends with school shooters,” as he was speaking about how he has met with parents of victims of the deadly Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

His campaign later clarified that he misspoke and was referring to friendships with the families of the school shooting victims, not the shooters themselves. But his gaffe went viral and he was roasted for it.

Criticizes Minnesota’s abortion law

“[T]he doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion,” Vance said during the debate.

Minnesota’s updated law, the Protect Reproductive Options Act, has been a line of attack against Walz, who signed it in January 2023. The bill codified Minnesotans’ access to reproductive care, including abortion, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Vance’s comment focused on the rare case of an infant surviving a late-term abortion. Minnesota’s amended law still requires medical personnel to care for the infant, “consistent with good medical practice.”

Infanticide is illegal in all 50 states and abortions after the 21st week of pregnancy represent 1% of procedures nationwide.

A national abortion ban

“I never supported a national ban. I did during when I was running for Senate in 2020 to talk about setting some minimum national standard,” Vance said.

Vance is being disingenuous here. He backed a law that would impose a nationwide limit of 15 weeks for when women could get an abortion — which would overturn the laws of many liberal states. In 2022, Vance said: “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.” Moreover, last year, he urged the Justice Department to enforce the Comstock Act, a 151-year-old federal law that bans the mailing of abortion-related materials. The Biden administration has not invoked the law, but a more conservative one could, thus limiting abortion rights even without any new laws.

Trump and the Affordable Care Act

“I think you can make a really good argument that [former President Donald Trump’s policies] salvaged Obamacare, which was doing disastrously until Donald Trump came along,” Vance said. “When Obamacare was crushing under the weight of its own regulatory burden and health care costs Donald Trump could have destroyed the program. Instead he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”

Throughout his presidency Trump attempted to weaken or repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, which provides subsidized health insurance and guarantees coverage for people with preexisting conditions.

On his first day in office Trump signed an executive order calling for its prompt repeal. He also cut funding for programs advertising and promoting ACA insurance marketplaces and supported a lawsuit to end ACA, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law.

Trump supported a repeal effort that failed in Congress with U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, casting the deciding “no” vote in 2017. Trump also allowed short-term health plans that didn’t include ACA protections.

Enrollment in ACA declined by 2 million during Trump’s presidency, according to the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact.

By comparison, this year a record 21.3 million people signed on to ACA marketplaces, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

App used by Haitian and other migrants

“There’s an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open-border wand,” Vance said.

Harris does not make the decision about who can enter the United States. The CBP One phone app was launched by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2020 when Trump was president and was expanded by the Biden administration.

The app allows migrants who are not inside the U.S. to schedule an appointment for processing by immigration officials at a designated point of entry. The people using it are not unauthorized immigrants because they are not in the U.S. when they use the scheduling app. When the migrants arrive they can be given humanitarian parole, which allows them to legally live and work in the U.S. temporarily. Once in the U.S. they can apply for asylum or Temporary Protected Status, which is what many of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, have.

Congress originally gave the executive branch parole authority for immigrants in 1952 and updated the authority in 1996, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Vance also said there are “20 to 25 million illegal aliens” in the U.S., which is a vast overstatement.

There are an estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S., about 79% of whom entered the country before 2010, according to a May report by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security using data through 2022.

Moderators briefly turned off the microphones and moved on to a new question as Walz and Vance continued arguing about the CBP app and federal immigration law.

Peaceful transfer of power

“It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January 20 as we have done for 250 years in this country,” Vance said.

Vance’s comment ignores the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters, which happened after Trump called for them to come to Washington, D.C., on the day Congress was to certify Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election.

Trump and his allies attempted to overturn the results in multiple states. Trump also asked then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject the Electoral College votes submitted by the states. Vance also has cast doubt on the 2020 election results and said he would have allowed Congress to consider alternate slates of Trump electors.

Trump pleaded not guilty to pending criminal charges in federal and Georgia state courts on allegations involving his efforts to overturn the election.

Trump still contends that the 2020 election was stolen from him, but multiple investigations, election audits and court rulings nationwide, along with Trump’s then-Attorney General William Barr, found no evidence of widespread fraud or election problems that would have overturned Biden’s win.

Asked by Walz if Trump lost the election, Vance did not answer, instead saying, “Tim, I am focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?”

Lynn Hulsey, a reporter at the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, contributed to this story. This story also contains material from the Washington Post.