Here are PolitiFact’s top 10 most read politician fact-checks of 2024

When better to fact-check politicians than in an election year?

In 2024, PolitiFact’s web traffic showed readers sought answers to questions raised by and about the leading presidential candidates, former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Whose national debt pile was bigger? Whose inflation record was worse? Was Trump right when he said Harris was a communist?  

Here’s a look at our top 10, most-read politician fact-checks from 2024, in reverse order of web popularity.

10. Trump’s False claim: Harris wants to ‘forcibly compel" doctors to give children ‘castration drugs’

Trump in July attacked Harris’ stance on gender-affirming care, saying she "wants to forcibly compel doctors and nurses against their will to give chemical castration drugs to young children."

Neither Trump nor his team specified which policies he meant. We found that Harris supported antidiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people, but hadn’t pushed to coerce doctors into giving medical care to children.

Trump also misleadingly characterized puberty blockers — medications that pause or suppress the release of hormones that lead to puberty-accompanying bodily changes. That’s why we rated his statement False.

9. Harris’ support for prisoner access to transgender surgery aligns with federal law and court rulings

During her Democratic presidential primary run in 2019, Harris said she supported access to gender-affirming surgery for people in federal prisons and immigration detention. A Trump campaign ad cited Harris saying, "Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access."

When a Fox News reporter in October asked her about her position, Harris said she’d "follow the law." Federal law requires inmates to receive access to necessary medical care, and courts have found that this can include medically necessary gender-affirming surgery. The Federal Bureau of Prisons under the Trump administration acknowledged legal obligations to provide this care.

We rated the Trump ad’s statement Mostly True.

8. Fact-checking Kamala Harris on Project 2025 limiting access to IVF, contraception

During the campaign, Democrats and Harris issued grave warnings about Project 2025, a 900-page policy playbook for the next Republican administration, including that it would restrict "access to IVF and contraception." Trump repeatedly sought to distance himself from the plan, which the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank authored.

Project 2025 doesn’t specifically recommend restricting in vitro fertilization, or IVF, or standard contraceptive methods, such as birth control pills or intrauterine devices. It does recommend restricting some emergency contraceptives from no-cost insurance coverage and has language supporting rights for fetuses and embryos, which legal experts said threatens family planning methods, including IVF and some forms of contraception.

We rated Harris’ claim Mostly False.

7. Fact-checking Donald Trump on the scale and causes of inflation under Biden, Harris

In panning the Biden-Harris administration’s inflation record, Trump in September said Harris "cast the tiebreaking votes that caused the worst inflation in American history, costing a typical American family $28,000."

Here was the element of truth: Harris cast the tiebreaking vote on the motion to proceed to a final Senate vote on the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus pandemic relief bill.

It was the rest of Trump’s statement that we found to be inaccurate or exaggerated.

Some economists had at first warned the bill would lead to inflation, but now say the law worsened inflation but didn’t solely cause the spike.

Year-over-year inflation rate during Biden’s term peaked at about 9% in summer 2022, the highest in about 40 years. But the highest sustained, year-over-year U.S. inflation rates were recorded in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the price increase sometimes ranged from 12% to 15%. And although the $28,000 increase was a credible estimate of how much extra households have paid for purchases since Biden took office, the figure ignored that wage gains had evened out much — or depending on the time frame, all — of those increased costs.

We rated Trump’s claim Mostly False.

6. Donald Trump’s Pants on Fire claim that he ‘never mentioned’ ending the Affordable Care Act

Trump has said a lot of things about the Affordable Care Act, the federal law then-President Barack Obama signed to expand access to health insurance. So, when he said in October that he "never mentioned" ending the law, our ears perked up.

In his first campaign and as president, Trump supported multiple efforts to jettison the Affordable Care Act, including congressional Republicans’ failed repeal-and-replace efforts. He also cut funding for the law’s marketing, outreach and enrollment assistance.

In March, he wrote on Truth Social that he is "not running to terminate" the health care law, but wants to make it "better" and "less expensive." 

We rated Trump’s claim Pants on Fire!

5. Why Harris’ debate remarks about US military in combat zones is misleading

During her September debate with Trump in Philadelphia, ABC News moderators asked Harris whether she bore responsibility for 13 service member deaths during the U.S.’ 2021 military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Harris defended Biden’s decision to pull troops out and said, "There is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone, in any war zone around the world, first time this century."

A Defense Department official told PolitiFact that the U.S. was neither engaged in a war nor had service members fighting in active war zones. However, thousands of U.S. military service members are stationed in areas considered combat zones and face hostilities from foreign adversaries. Some of these service members have been killed or injured during military operations.

We rated Harris’ statement Mostly False.

4. Trump’s False crowd comparison with his Jan. 6 speech and the crowd at MLK’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech

During an August press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Trump recalled his Jan. 6, 2021, remarks to supporters on the White House Ellipse.

Trump said he spoke to the "same number of people, if not, we had more" than Martin Luther King’s 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech. The House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack put the crowd number at 53,000, or at most a quarter of the generally accepted size of the crowd during King’s speech. The National Archives says 250,000 people attended the March on Washington during King’s speech. The U.S. Census Bureau says "more than 200,000."

We rated the comparison False.

3. Fact-check: Trump called Kamala Harris a communist and a Marxist. Pants on Fire!

Trump frequently mocked Harris during his campaign rallies, calling her "Comrade Kamala," and in August, he said, she "is a communist. … She is really a Marxist." But four experts we interviewed said unanimously that she’s neither.

Trump’s campaign pointed to Harris’ plan to apply price controls to ban price gouging. Although some liberals called the proposal ill-advised, its scope fell far short of communist policy, which advocates a political system of government or a party that abolishes private property. Harris didn’t call to seize private homes or businesses.

We rated Trump’s claim Pants on Fire!

2. ‘Border czar'? Kamala Harris assigned to tackle immigration's causes, not border security

At their national convention in July, Republicans sought to link Harris to Biden’s immigration policy. They claimed he’d named her "border czar," overseeing U.S. border enforcement.

Biden assigned Harris to address the root causes driving migration to the United States, not to control who and how many people enter the southern U.S. border. That's the Homeland Security secretary’s responsibility.

We rated the claim Mostly False. 

1. Fact-checking Joe Biden on debt accumulated under Donald Trump

During his 2024 State of the Union address in March, Biden said Trump’s administration "added more to the national debt than any presidential term in American history. Check the numbers, folks." 

Being PolitiFact, we did.

As of March, when we wrote this check, U.S. debt under Biden had risen by a little less than $6.7 trillion. That was smaller than Trump’s total $7.8 trillion by Treasury Department data. But Biden left out that the debt under his watch was on pace to exceed Trump’s one-term debt accumulation by Jan. 20, 2025, when he leaves office and Trump returns.

A caveat: Assigning debt to a particular president can be misleading because so much of it traces back to decades-old, bipartisan legislation that set the parameters for Social Security and Medicare.

The statement is partially accurate but needs additional context. We rated it Half True.