FactChecking the First Trump-Biden Debate

Note: This story has been corrected. Read more.

Summary

President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden met on the debate stage for the first time and stretched or mangled facts on several topics:

• Trump exaggerated instances of election “fraud,” misleadingly citing ballots “found … in creeks” and a case where a thousand voters were mistakenly sent two ballots. Neither is evidence of “fraud.”
• Trump falsely claimed that Biden supports the Medicare for All plan. He never did.
• Biden got it wrong when he claimed there was “15% less violence” during his time in office than today. The violent crime rate dropped under Trump.
• Trump misleadingly claimed people “weren’t allowed to watch” the polls in Philadelphia. Only satellite elections offices, where voters can return mail-in ballots, are open now.
• Trump claimed he had been endorsed by the sheriff in Portland, which isn’t true, and he suggested that Biden had gotten no support from law enforcement officials, which is false.
• Trump boasted than he “brought back 700,000 manufacturing jobs,” which was never true. Currently 237,000 have been lost.
• Trump denied that climate change plays a role in California’s wildfires. Scientists say it’s a contributing factor.
• Both candidates gave potentially misleading impressions of when Americans can expect a COVID-19 vaccine.
• Biden said 10 million people lost their employer-sponsored insurance during the pandemic, but the study he relies upon also said all but 3.5 million of them would regain insurance from another source.
• Biden said Trump’s Supreme Court nominee has “written … that she thinks the Affordable Care Act is not constitutional.” Not quite, though she faulted a 2012 opinion upholding the law.
• Trump claimed that “drug prices will be coming down 80 or 90%.” Actually it’s not clear what the impact of his executive orders will be.
• Trump said Biden called military members “stupid bastards,” which Biden denied. The vice president did use those words while addressing troops overseas in 2016, but his campaign has said it was in jest.
• Trump wrongly said Biden “forgot the name” of his college. Biden in 2019 said he “started out of … Delaware State,” but a university official said Biden was referring to announcing his Senate bid on campus.
• Trump said that he has “given big incentives for electric cars.” He’s actually tried to eliminate programs to encourage their manufacture and sale.
• Biden falsely claimed that Trump didn’t try to send experts to China early in the coronavirus pandemic.
• Trump said when Biden was working on the 1994 crime bill, he called African Americans “super-predators.” Actually, that was a phrase famously uttered by Hillary Clinton — not Biden — about some “gangs of kids.”
• Trump said “I don’t think” Kellyanne Conway, his former White House counselor, said “riots and chaos and violence help his cause,” as Biden claimed. Conway did say something like that.
• Biden wrongly claimed that the United States has “a higher deficit with China now than we did before” in talking about trade. The deficit is actually lower.
• Trump claimed that in relaxing the Obama administration’s more stringent fuel economy standards, cars would be $3,500 cheaper. Even going by the administration’s analysis, that’s inflated.

And there were more claims on topics including veterans, the economy and preexisting conditions.

The two presidential candidates debated on Sept. 29 in Cleveland. Fox News’ Chris Wallace was the moderator.

Analysis

Trump’s Flimsy Election ‘Fraud’ Case

Making his case that mail-in voting has already resulted in large scale “fraud,” Trump cited two examples that are not evidence of fraud at all.

“There’s fraud,” Trump said. “They found them in creeks. … They sent two in a Democrat area. They sent out a thousand ballots, everybody got two. This is going to be fraud like you’ve never seen.”

In recent days, Trump has referred to ballots found in a ditch or a riverbed or, as he did during the debate, “in creeks.” Law enforcement officials in Wisconsin reported that three trays of mail were found Sept. 21 along the side of a road and in a ditch next to a highway in Greenville. Officials there said the batch of mail included “several” absentee ballots, though a Postal Service spokesman would not comment on whether those were completed ballots, or blank ones being sent to voters, according to the Post Crescent. The paper quoted the county clerk saying election officials started to mail out ballots to voters on Sept. 17.

As for the claim about a thousand people being sent two ballots, that’s true. As NBC4 in Washington reported, election officials in Fairfax County, Virginia, believe up to 1,000 people who requested mail-in ballots may have gotten two by mistake. But it’s not evidence of fraud. Those people who got two ballots won’t be able to vote twice.

Fairfax County Registrar Gary Scott said that when every ballot is returned, “we make an entry into their voter record that they have returned a ballot. So if something else shows up, the ballot has already been returned. We can’t count that ballot.”

And despite Trump’s repeated warning about large-scale fraud with mail-in voting, as we have noted, while the instances of voter fraud via mail-in or absentee ballots are more common than in-person voting fraud, the number of known cases is relatively rare.

It’s Biden’s Health Plan, Not Sanders’

Trump interrupted Biden’s discussion of his health plan to falsely claim that Biden supports Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan. The president wrongly claimed that the two rivals for the Democratic nomination agreed to it in the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations report.

Joe, you agree with Bernie Sanders —