Vice President Kamala Harris’s first interview since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee featured vague answers about policy and a number of misleading statements about her record.
Harris sought to thread a needle on the economy, distancing herself from the economic realities causing voters’ anxiety while embracing the Biden administration’s initiatives that have been popular, such as lowering prescription drug prices.
Here are some of Harris’s misleading claims.
1. ‘The economy had crashed’
“Well, let’s start with the fact that when Joe Biden and I came in office during the height of a pandemic, we saw over 10 million jobs were lost. People — I mean, literally we are all tracking the numbers. Hundreds of people a day were dying because of COVID. The economy had crashed. In large part, all of that [was] because of mismanagement by Donald Trump of that crisis.”
Harris sought to portray the pandemic-era job losses and death toll as former President Donald Trump’s fault, although neither can really be attributed to Trump.
Millions of jobs disappeared in 2020 due to the lockdowns, which President Joe Biden also supported as he ran against Trump that year. Biden and Harris went further than Trump in supporting COVID-19 mandates after taking office as well.
The unemployment rate under Trump in August 2019, a comparable time period prior to the pandemic, was 3.7%, while the current unemployment rate under Biden and Harris is 4.3%. Democrats have touted the millions of jobs created during the Biden-Harris administration, but most of that growth came from the return of jobs that went away during the pandemic.
Harris’s comment about the pace of COVID-19 deaths was also misleading. More people died from the virus in 2021, under Biden and Harris, than during the same time frame in 2020 under Trump.
2. Cut child poverty by 50%
“When we do what we did in the first year of being in office to extend the child tax credit so that we cut child poverty in America by over 50%.”
Harris’s claim about what the administration has done to reduce child poverty is exaggerated.
The vice president was most likely referring to the expansion of the child tax credit that the American Rescue Plan Act provided in 2021. That expansion was temporary, lasting only a year, because it was part of pandemic relief measures.
The supplemental poverty measure, a metric used by the Census Bureau, for children in 2021 fell by 46% from the previous year to a low of 5.2%.
But the drop in child poverty, like the tax credit, was only temporary. In 2022, the child poverty rate had shot up to 16.3%.
And the push to grow the child tax credit is not strictly a Democratic policy. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Trump’s running mate, has proposed increasing the credit even more than the American Rescue Plan did.
As president, Trump doubled the maximum child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 with his 2017 tax cut bill.
3. Fracking flip-flop
DANA BASH: Do you still want to ban fracking?
KAMALA HARRIS: No, and I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020, that I would not ban fracking.
Harris’s claim that she has been clear about her opposition to a fracking ban is not quite accurate.
As a presidential candidate in the Democratic primary in 2019, Harris said she supported a ban on fracking.
After she dropped out of the primary and Biden selected her as his running mate, Harris adopted the Biden campaign’s line.
Her reference on Thursday to the debate stage in 2020 was a reference to the debate she had with then-Vice President Mike Pence in October 2020, not the debates she participated in during her own campaign that cycle.
“Joe Biden will not end fracking. He has been very clear about that,” Harris said during that debate.
This is where Harris’s careful political calculations can get tricky. When it helps to neutralize the progressivism of her past, Harris has characterized the Biden administration’s policies as no different from her own, as she did with her answer about fracking. But when it helps to distance herself from the unpopular effects of the Biden administration’s policies, Harris has cast her proposals as newer and more aggressive than Biden’s, as she has with her plans to lower the cost of living.
4. ‘Root causes’ of immigration addressed
“Well, first of all, the root causes work that I did as vice president, that I was asked to do by the president, has actually resulted in a number of benefits, including historic investments by American businesses in that region. The number of immigrants coming from that region has actually reduced since we’ve began that work.”
Defending her record as the Biden administration’s point person on addressing the “root causes” of illegal immigration, Harris said she had achieved some success in that role.
She specified during the interview that her portfolio included only the Northern Triangle countries in Central America: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
While she is correct that illegal immigration from those countries fell between 2021 and 2024, her claim does not tell the whole story. Apprehensions at the border of migrants from the Northern Triangle countries continue to remain significantly higher than under the Trump administration — before Biden and Harris took office and ended a number of Trump-era policies that were keeping those numbers low.
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Border Patrol agents apprehended 588,000 Northern Triangle migrants crossing the border under Biden and Harris in 2021, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, and saw that number decline steadily to 447,000 apprehensions in fiscal 2023. The number is projected to dip further to 418,000 this fiscal year.
But in 2020, just 104,000 migrants from the region were apprehended at the border.
In other words, illegal immigration spiked dramatically when Biden and Harris implemented their immigration agenda and has remained relatively high since.
