This video reviews some of the statements that we fact-checked during the Democratic National Convention, which ended Aug. 20 with former Vice President Joe Biden accepting his party’s nomination for president.
Our video covers these five claims:
- Biden correctly noted that there have been more than 5 million confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. and more than 170,000 deaths, but then said that America has “by far the worst performance of any nation.” While that’s true based on the raw totals of COVID-19 cases and deaths, the U.S. is not the worst when adjusted for population or on other metrics.
- Former President Bill Clinton misleadingly compared the current U.S. unemployment rate to those of other countries, including the United Kingdom. But Clinton’s comparison is meaningless, because the U.S. counts a laid-off worker as “unemployed” even if the layoff is expected to be temporary — while many other countries do not.
- Hillary Clinton, the party’s 2016 presidential nominee, said that “billionaires got $400 billion richer” during the pandemic. That misleading figure comes from two liberal groups that calculated net worth gains during what they erroneously called “the first two months” of the pandemic, beginning March 18. That ignores the stock market crash a month earlier.
- Sen. Bernie Sanders also cited a liberal advocacy group when he claimed Biden’s support for a $15 minimum wage “will give 40 million workers a pay raise and push the wage scale up for everyone else.” But the Congressional Budget Office projects a much less dramatic impact, and some probable job losses.
- Former Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said when Barack Obama and Joe Biden were in the White House, “They extended overtime pay to more than 4 million workers.” They tried to do that, but the Obama-era rule never went into effect.
Please see our convention stories for details on these and other claims that we wrote about during the four-day nominating event.