Third Night of the Democratic Convention

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Summary

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz accepted his party’s vice presidential nomination, and repeated claims he has made before about the Republican ticket. Other speakers tried to link former President Donald Trump to Project 2025, among other claims.

• Walz made the unsupported claim that Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, will “gut Social Security and Medicare.” Trump has promised not to cut either program.

• Walz said the Republican ticket “will ban abortion across this country with or without Congress.” Trump and Vance voiced support for a national ban of some kind in the past, but now both say the abortion issue should be left to the states.

• Several speakers cited Project 2025, a conservative plan published by the Heritage Foundation, and tied Trump to its policies. Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware went so far as to falsely say Trump “wrote” it. He did not. Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, saying “it doesn’t speak for me.”

• Colorado Gov. Jared Polis called Project 2025 “Donald Trump’s roadmap to ban abortion in all 50 states,” alluding to the document’s suggestion that the Comstock Act should be enforced to prevent the mailing of abortion pills. But Trump recently said he would not enforce the Comstock Act.

• Polis’ claim that Project 2025 “puts limits on contraception” and “threatens access to IVF” requires more context. But Trump has said he supports both contraceptives and in vitro fertilization, or IVF.

• House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries misleadingly claimed that “83% of the benefits” from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act “went to the wealthiest 1% in America.” That’s estimated to be the case in 2027, if the income tax changes in the 2017 law expire. In earlier years, the top 1% of income earners received a much smaller share of the benefits.

• Along the same lines, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg claimed that Trump only kept a promise to “cut taxes for the rich,” when the Tax Policy Center estimated that the tax law “would reduce taxes on average for all income groups.”

• Former President Bill Clinton said Trump had “implied that if his beautiful people voted one more time, they’d be able to rig it. From now on, they wouldn’t have to vote again.” Trump didn’t say he would rig anything.

• Buttigieg said that “crime was higher on his watch,” referring to Trump’s presidency. Murders and aggravated assaults went up, though the increase all came in 2020. The overall violent crime rate, however, declined slightly.

• Finally, Clinton claimed that since 1989 a total of 50 million jobs were added under Democratic presidents, while just 1 million were added under Republican presidents. The stat checks out, but it’s a bit cherry-picked and is greatly influenced by factors outside a president’s control.

Analysis

Social Security and Medicare

Walz, like other convention speakers this week, made the unsupported claim that Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, will “gut Social Security and Medicare.” He said it while predicting what will happen “if these guys get back in the White House.”

Trump has promised to protect both programs for seniors, if elected, and he hasn’t released any detailed proposal to cut either program. However, his plan to eliminate taxes on Social Security income for seniors could result in reduced Social Security and Medicare benefits in the next decade, unless Trump provides a plan to replace the revenues that both programs would lose under his no-tax plan. Otherwise, a future Congress and president would have to replace the lost funds.

As we’ve written before, Trump’s budgets when he was president didn’t propose cuts to Social Security’s retirement benefits, although his budgets did propose cutting the Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income programs. His budgets also included bipartisan proposals to reduce the growth of Medicare without cutting benefits.

Democrats have accused Trump of wanting to cut Social Security and Medicare based on his comments in a March 11 interview with CNBC. When asked how he would address the rising costs of both programs, Trump said: “So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements.” His campaign said Trump was talking about cutting waste and fraud, not benefits.

Abortion Ban

After predicting that Trump and Vance would “gut Social Security and Medicare,” Walz repeated the outdated claim that “they will ban abortion across this country with or without Congress.” Trump used to support that position, but now says the issue should be left entirely up to each individual state.

Walz has made this claim before, including at his first campaign appearance as a vice presidential candidate. At a rally with Harris in Philadelphia, Walz said Trump “said he’d ban abortion across this country.”

In his 2016 campaign and as president, Trump supported a federal abortion ban after 20 weeks of pregnancy. In a letter to anti-abortion leaders in 2016, he said he would sign a bill that would institute that ban, with some exceptions for victims of rape or incest and if the mother’s life is in danger. He made the same commitment while speaking to March for Life participants in January 2018.

Since then, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the court’s 1973 decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion, due to the three justices Trump was able to appoint to the court. The court’s June 2022 ruling returned the jurisdiction on abortion rights to the states.

Now, Trump says he won’t support a national ban. On April 8, he released a four-minute video on Truth Social saying that he would leave the abortion issue to the states. “The states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land,” Trump said.

Two days later, he definitively said “no” when asked whether he would sign a national abortion ban if Congress passed one. 

During his 2022 election, Vance told the Cincinnati Enquirer that abortion should be “primarily a state issue,” but he left open the possibility of “some minimum national standard.” More recently, Vance, in an Aug. 11 interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” said that “we need to let the states decide their specific abortion policy.”

“I think that what we really want is when states and voters in those states make decisions, we of course want the states and the federal government to respect those decisions, and that’s what President Trump has said is, consistently, we need to get out of the culture war side of the abortion issue,” Vance said. “We need to let the states decide their specific abortion policy.”

What states do could have national implications — regardless of Trump’s position — since lawsuits over those actions could eventually make their way to the Supreme Court. That’s how Roe was overturned: The court ruled on a challenge to a Mississippi law that banned abortion after 15 weeks.

The 2024 Republican platform also said that states would determine the issue. However, the platform refers to laws that would grant fetuses the same rights as people. The news site the 19th wrote that if states passed the so-called fetal “personhood” laws, it “would have the practical effect of prohibiting abortion at all stages of pregnancy. Its impact could become national if courts affirm state-level laws that extend the application of the 14th Amendment to fetuses.”

Project 2025 and Abortion

Several speakers cited Project 2025, a conservative plan for a future administration published by the Heritage Foundation, and tied Trump to the policies in the 900-page document. Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware went so far as to say Trump “wrote” it. He did not.

Trump has distanced himself from the project and said he agrees with some things in it and disagrees with others, without offering many specifics.

In April 2022, at a Heritage Foundation conference, Trump appeared to refer to the project, saying, “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” CNN has reported that more than 100 people involved in the project worked in the Trump administration. But the former president has said that some of it is “seriously extreme” and “I don’t know anything about it,” as he said in a July 22 rally in Michigan.

“And it’s a group of very conservative people that probably like me, but it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t speak for me,” Trump said in an interview on “Fox & Friends” on July 25. “They wrote something that I disagree with in many cases — and in some cases, you agree.”

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis called Project 2025 “Donald Trump’s roadmap to ban abortion in all 50 states,” alluding to the document’s suggestion that the Comstock Act should be enforced to prevent the mailing of abortion pills. But Trump recently has indicated he would not enforce the Comstock Act.

“Look, that sounds crazy, but right here on page 562, it says that Donald Trump could use an obscure law from the 1800s to single-handedly ban abortion in all 50 states, even putting doctors in jail,” Polis said.

Under a broad interpretation, the Comstock Act — an 1873 anti-vice law — could indeed be used to prohibit shipment of all abortion-related materials, with penalties involving imprisonment. The page Polis cited from Project 2025 suggests the act should be enforced specifically to prevent the mailing of abortion pills. More than half of all abortions in the U.S. are medication abortions.

During an Aug. 19 interview with CBS News, when asked whether he would enforce the act, Trump said, “We will be discussing specifics of it, but generally speaking, no, I would not.”

On the topic of the availability of abortion medications, Trump said: “Well, it’s going to be available, and it is now. And as I know it, the Supreme Court has said, ‘Keep it going the way it is.’ I will enforce and agree with the Supreme Court.” 

The Comstock Act includes a section that prohibits mailing every “article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.”

Possible penalties for using the mail in such a way include fines, imprisonment of up to five years or both for a first offense.

As Polis suggested, Project 2025 advocates on page 562 that the Department of Justice “in the next conservative Administration” should “announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills,” referring to abortion pills and referencing the Comstock Act.

Health policy experts have suggested that the Comstock Act could be interpreted even more broadly. “A literal interpretation of the Comstock Act would criminalize sending and receiving shipments of any materials necessary to provide any kind of abortion care without exceptions, although it would be practically impossible to enforce,” according to an article published by KFF, a nonprofit health policy research organization.

Project 2025 and Contraception, IVF, Working Dads

Polis’ claim that Project 2025 “puts limits on contraception” and “threatens access to IVF” requires more context. But Trump has said he supports both contraceptives and IVF.

Project 2025 does not call for placing direct limits on typical contraception methods, such as birth control pills or intrauterine devices, or IUDs, as PolitiFact has explained. It does, however, want to remove mandatory insurance coverage for Ella, an emergency contraceptive that works up to five days after sexual intercourse (page 485), and rescind a rule the Biden administration proposed that relates to moral and religious exemptions for employers who do not wish to cover contraceptives for their employees (page 483).

Project 2025 explains that it wishes to “eliminate” Ella from the government’s contraceptive mandate because it is a “potential abortifacient,” or capable of inducing an abortion. The Affordable Care Act requires that health insurance plans cover preventive care, including contraception, at no cost to the patient. Emergency contraceptives, however, work by preventing ovulation and pregnancy, and the idea that they cause abortions is not backed by science. 

The document also says policymakers “should end taxpayer funding” of Planned Parenthood because the organization performs abortions. This could indirectly limit access to contraception, since many people rely on Planned Parenthood for those services.

Project 2025 doesn’t directly address IVF, either. Some statements, however, could be interpreted to support fetal “personhood” laws, or the idea that embryos or fetuses should be granted the same rights as a person who has been born.

“From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities,” page 450 reads. “The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.”

Fetal “personhood” laws complicate IVF because in the procedure eggs are retrieved and mixed with sperm to create embryos in the lab. Embryos are typically frozen and transferred to a patient’s uterus one at a time, as needed. Leftover embryos are often discarded.

In February, Alabama’s state Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are legally children and patients could sue clinics for the wrongful death of their embryos. Before a state law was passed that explicitly gave IVF clinics and patients immunity, several clinics halted their services because they did not want to risk legal jeopardy.

Trump has been clear that he supports IVF, as we’ve written. “I strongly support the availability of IVF for couples who are trying to have a precious baby,” he said in a video he posted to social media in April. 

The 2024 GOP platform, which Trump endorsed, also affirms support for IVF, although it simultaneously nods to fetal personhood — without making clear how it reconciles the two issues.

Trump has similarly maintained support for contraceptives. “I HAVE NEVER, AND WILL NEVER ADVOCATE IMPOSING RESTRICTIONS ON BIRTH CONTROL, or other contraceptives,” he wrote in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, in May. 

We asked the Trump campaign to comment specifically on emergency contraception, but did not receive a reply.

Polis also went too far when he claimed Project 2025 “says the only legitimate family is a married mother and father where only the father works.” The document states that families with a mother and father who are married “are the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society” and extols the benefits of working fathers — but does not say mothers shouldn’t work.

Misleading Tax Claims

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, misleadingly claimed that “Trump was the mastermind of the GOP tax scam, where 83% of the benefits went to the wealthiest 1% in America.”

Jeffries was referring to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed into law in December 2017. As we’ve written, the Tax Policy Center did estimate that about 83% of the tax benefits would go to the top 1% of earners – but not until 2027, a year after the law’s individual income tax cuts are scheduled to expire. At that point, the remaining tax cuts for corporations would largely benefit individuals in that income group.

Before then, the top 1% would receive a smaller share of the tax law’s benefits, the TPC said. In 2018, 20.5% of the tax cut benefits would go to that group of income earners, and by 2025 — the year before the tax changes expire — the share of the tax cuts going to the wealthiest 1% would increase to about one-quarter.

Overall, the TPC analysis said that the TCJA “would reduce taxes on average for all income groups in both 2018 and 2025” — contradicting Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s claim that “the only economic promise that [Trump] actually kept was to cut taxes for the rich.”

Higher-income groups would see larger tax cuts, on average, but other income groups also would benefit from Trump’s tax cuts, the nonpartisan tax analysts said.

Trump’s ‘Won’t Have to Vote Anymore’ Comments

Both former President Bill Clinton and talk show host/author Oprah Winfrey referenced a somewhat cryptic comment Trump made last month at a conservative Christian summit hosted by the political advocacy arm of Turning Point USA.

Clinton claimed that Trump had “implied that if his beautiful people voted one more time, they’d be able to rig it. From now on, they wouldn’t have to vote again.” Trump didn’t promise to “rig” anything. Rather, he made a vague comment about voting and hasn’t done much to clarify it.

Winfrey made a general reference to Trump’s comment, saying, “Now, there’s a certain candidate that says, if we just go to the polls this one time, that we’ll never have to do it again.”

At the end of his roughly hourlong speech on July 26, Trump said:

“If you want to save America — get your friends, get your family, get everyone you know and vote. Vote early, vote absentee, vote on Election Day — I don’t care how, but you have to get out and vote. And, Christians, get out and vote — just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore — four more years, you know what, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you. Get out, you’ve got to get out and vote. In four years you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

That comment generated press coverage, including the Trump campaign’s response to a request to clarify the remarks. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung didn’t directly answer, but said Trump “was talking about uniting this country,” when asked about it by Reuters.

Some Democratic politicians took to social media to suggest that Trump was hinting at authoritarianism.

Three days after Trump made his remarks, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham pressed him to clarify, although he largely reiterated his initial comments, saying that if Christians vote for him in this election, “We won’t even need your vote anymore because, frankly, we will have such love, if you don’t want to vote anymore, that’s OK.”

Ingraham then asked if he would leave office after a four-year term.

“Of course and, by the way, I did last time,” said Trump, who did leave office in 2020, while falsely claiming that the election had been stolen from him after he lost to President Joe Biden.

Crime

Buttigieg said that “crime was higher on his watch,” referring to Trump’s presidency. Murders and aggravated assaults went up, though the increase all came in 2020. The overall violent crime rate, however, declined slightly.

The nationwide murder rate increased from 5.4 per 100,000 population in 2016, the year before Trump took office, to 6.8 in 2020, according to the FBI’s 2022 Crime in the United States report, the most recent report available. (See Table 1 after downloading the CIUS Estimations file.) The aggravated assault rate went from 250.4 to 277.2. The overall violent crime rate, however, which also includes rape and robbery, dropped from 389.9 in 2016 to 385.2 in 2020. The property crime rate was down, too, from 2,467.5 in 2016 to 1,963.9 in 2020, a 20.4% decline.

The big increase in murders came in 2020, when the number of murders rose 32.2%. Experts have told us that several factors were likely behind the increase, most notably the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a loss of jobs and disproportionately affected vulnerable populations.

Under the Biden/Harris administration, the rate and number of murders have gone down, after a small uptick in the number of murders in 2021. Preliminary FBI figures for 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 — as well as data collected by other groups, such as the Major Cities Chiefs Association — indicate that downward trend has continued, as we’ve written.

Despite the ongoing disagreement between the Harris and Trump campaigns over violent crime, experts say that presidents, regardless of party, have little to do with noticeable changes in crime.

The late criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, who wrote about crime trends for the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice at the end of his long career in this field, told us in 2021 that presidents “can facilitate a response,” citing an initiative by Biden at the time to work with cities to reduce gun violence. “But no president, in my memory, has ever single-handedly been responsible for a sharp crime increase or for that matter a sharp crime decline. Crime is driven by other factors and the president has little control over those factors.”

“Who is in the White House has little to no direct connection to what is inherently a state/local crime problem,” John L. Worrall, a criminal justice professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, also told us.

Clinton’s Triple-Checked Jobs Stat

Former President Bill Clinton cited a statistic about jobs created under Democratic presidents versus Republican ones since 1989, and he said he triple-checked it.

“You’re going to have a hard time believing this, but so help me, I triple-checked it,” Clinton said. “Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs. I swear I checked this three times, even I couldn’t believe it. What’s the score? Democrats 50, Republicans 1.”

Despite Clinton’s assurances, and his history of giving fact-checkers little fodder, we decided we better check it a fourth time. And we found that, under the framing Clinton provided, he’s right.

Since 1989, there was a net of 1.3 million jobs added under Republican presidents (George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Donald Trump) and 50.3 million under Democratic presidents (Clinton, Barack Obama and Biden), according to employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Technical note: The BLS on Aug. 21 announced that its preliminary estimate for the annual benchmark revisions to employment data indicates that 818,000 fewer jobs were created in the last 12 months, which would drop the total for Democratic presidents to about 49.5 million. The BLS said the final revision will be issued next year.)

But some caveats are in order. Democrats were in office longer — 16 years under Republicans to 19.5 years under Democrats. (Had Clinton included statistics from President Ronald Reagan, say, that would’ve added 16 million jobs to the Republican ledger.)

More importantly, factors largely outside a president’s control often shape the job market. For example, there were 6.4 million jobs added in Trump’s first three years in office, according to the BLS. And then the pandemic hit. Between February and April 2020, 21.9 million jobs were lost. Nearly 12.5 million of those jobs had returned by the time Trump left office, but the entirety of Trump’s presidency shows a net loss of 2.7 million jobs.

Conversely, there have been 15.8 million jobs created during Biden’s presidency as of July, pending the final benchmark revision to be issued in February 2025. But many of those were jobs recovered after the pandemic subsided. There are now 6.4 million more people employed than before the pandemic hit.

FactCheck.org Undergraduate Fellow Logan Chapman contributed to this story.

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