Fact-checking DNC Night 2: What Democratic speakers got right, wrong

CHICAGO — Two decades after exploding onto the political scene at a different Democratic convention, former President Barack Obama, along with former first lady Michelle Obama, energized convention attendees here. The Obamas bestowed their support on nominee Kamala Harris, who aims to follow Barack Obama as the nation’s second Black president.

Barack Obama began his address by praising outgoing President Joe Biden. "I am proud to call him my president, but I am even prouder to call him my friend," Obama said of Biden, his former vice president.

Obama attacked Harris’ opponent, former President Donald Trump with zingers, once needling Trump for a "weird obsession with crowd sizes" (which also involved a suggestive hand gesture). 

Barack Obama offered a few notes that rhymed with his career-making 2004 keynote address at the Democratic convention in Boston, in which he argued against the idea that there is a blue America and a red America.

Michelle Obama’s speech also offered some optimistic notes, including the notion that "hope is making a comeback" with Harris’ late entry into the presidential race as Biden’s would-be successor. But the former first lady’s remarks were sometimes  even more acerbic than her husband’s.

She said, for example, that Trump had benefited from the "affirmative action of generational wealth" yet still managed to get "a second, third or fourth chance" while regularly "whining" or "cheating." She also criticized Trump — an early spreader of the "birther" conspiracy theory that doubted that Obama was born in the U.S. — for having made Americans "fear us" as an educated, high-achieving couple who "happen to be Black."

PolitiFact fact-checks politicians across the political spectrum. We also fact-checked the Republican National Convention in July. Read more about our process.

Here are some fact-checks of claims made during the convention’s second night.

Barack Obama: Under Joe Biden, the U.S. produced "15 million jobs, higher wages, lower health care costs." 

Half True.

He’s right about jobs: The U.S. has added 15.8 million jobs since January 2021, when Biden was sworn in, though some of those represented the workforce return of workers the pandemic had sidelined. 

Wages are up under Biden without factoring in inflation. But for his full tenure, wages have trailed inflation, which hit a four-decade high under Biden. Nevertheless, wages have outpaced inflation over the past two years, the past year and compared with before the pandemic. 

Whether health care costs were lower overall is a trickier question, because there’s great variation from family to family and person to person. However, U.S. health care expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product peaked during the pandemic in 2020 and have since fallen roughly to prepandemic levels. This represented the biggest sustained decline in decades.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks Aug. 20. 2024, at the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago. (AP)

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.: "Unemployment was soaring" when Biden and Harris took office in January 2021.

Mostly False.

Sanders overstated the unemployment situation that existed when Biden and Harris were inaugurated.

In April 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the unemployment rate surged to 14.8% as millions of Americans lost their jobs. 

But by the time Biden took office in January 2021, the rate had fallen to 6.4%, and it continued to fall that year.

So it wasn’t "soaring" any longer, though the rate was still high by historical standards. It was lower than 6.4% for about six years prepandemic.

July’s unemployment rate is 4.3%.

Pennsylvania state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, D-Philadelphia: "And on Page 587, Project 2025 would cut overtime pay for hardworking Americans."

Half True.

Labor law experts have told PolitiFact that the Project 2025 plan would not eliminate overtime pay, but some workers could lose overtime protections if the plan’s proposals are enacted. It’s hard to say how many; it would depend on what’s enacted.

The document proposes that the Labor Department maintain an overtime threshold "that does not punish businesses in lower-cost regions (e.g., the southeast United States)." This threshold is the amount of money executive, administrative or professional employees need to make for an employer to exempt them from overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act. 

In 2019, the Trump administration finalized a rule that expanded overtime pay eligibility to most salaried workers earning less than about $35,568. The Biden administration raised that threshold to $43,888 beginning July 1, and that will rise to $58,656 on Jan. 1, 2025.

Project 2025’s proposal would return to the Trump-era threshold in some parts of the country. It’s unclear how many workers that would affect, but experts said some would presumably lose the right to overtime wages. 

Other proposals in the plan include allowing some workers to choose to accumulate paid time off instead of overtime pay, to work more hours in one week and fewer in the next rather than receive overtime and requiring employers to pay overtime for working on the Sabbath.

Former first lady Michelle Obama speaks Aug. 20, 2024, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. (AP)

Former first lady Michelle Obama: One of Trump’s proposals is "shutting down the Department of Education."

True.

Trump has said he would abolish the Education Department, a proposal he shares with Project 2025, an agenda independently produced by some Trump allies.

It’s also something conservative groups have pushed for decades. The idea is to save a few essential functions and hand them to other agencies.

Trump’s education agenda also includes universal school choice, not spending federal dollars on schools that have vaccine mandates, allowing prayer in school, making principals directly elected by voters, subsidizing homeschooling and abolishing tenure for K-12 teachers.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.: "Democrats lowered prescription drug prices."

Mostly True.

The Democrats did take historic steps to lower prices for Medicare recipients, but that’s a limited group of people and for many drugs that will take time.

In August 2022, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which allows the federal government to negotiate prices with drugmakers for Medicare. It passed without Republican support. The same law capped the monthly price of insulin at $35 for Medicare enrollees starting in 2023. 

The Biden-Harris administration announced Aug. 15 that the federal government had reached agreements with all participating manufacturers on new negotiated drug prices for the first 10 drugs selected under the new law.

That will define the prices to be paid for prescriptions starting in 2026. For 2027 and 2028, 15 more drugs per year will be chosen for price negotiations. Starting in 2029, 20 more will be chosen a year. 

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham waves Aug. 20, 2024, during the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago. (AP)

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham: Donald Trump and JD Vance want to "repeal the Affordable Care Act."

Half True.

Trump’s new position doesn’t match his old one, but more details are needed.

In 2016, Trump campaigned on a promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. As president, Trump supported a failed effort to do just that. In the years since, he has repeatedly stated his intent to dismantle the health care law, including in campaign stops and social media posts throughout 2023.

In March, however, Trump walked back this stance. He wrote on Truth Social that he "isn’t running to terminate" the ACA but to make it "better" and "less expensive."

Trump hasn’t said how he would do this, and health care policy experts said it’s difficult to know where he stands absent a detailed plan. Experts identified an array of possible changes that another Trump administration could execute but said a sweeping repeal likely isn’t in the cards given a lack of political support.

Sanders: "We cut childhood poverty by over 40% through an expanded child tax credit."

Mostly True.

Biden’s American Rescue Plan increased the child tax credit from $2,000 to $3,600 for children younger than 6 and to $3,000 for children 6 to 17.

We previously reported that supplemental poverty numbers showed poverty among all U.S. children dropped from 9.7% in 2020 to 5.2% in 2021, the Census Bureau said — a decline of 46%. About 5.3 million people were lifted out of poverty, including 2.9 million children. 

The provision lapsed after December 2021, facing opposition from Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin, now an independent, who argued that expanding the credit would worsen inflation. 

When the expanded tax credit expired, supplemental child poverty spiked, rising from 12.1% in December 2021 to 17% in January 2022 — a 41% change.

Kamala Harris in a DNC video: Trump "wants to impose what is in effect a national sales tax on everyday products and basic necessities that we import from other countries. … (it) would cost a typical family $3,900 a year."

Trump has said that he would propose a 10% tariff on all nondomestic goods sold in the U.S. Although tariffs are levied separately from taxes, economists say that much of their impact would be passed along to consumers, making them analogous to a tax.

The video’s figure about how much it will cost families is higher than current estimates.

The American Action Forum, a center-right think tank, has projected additional costs per household of $1,700 to $2,350 annually.

The Peterson Institute of International Economics, another Washington, D.C.-based think tank, projected that such tariffs would cost a middle-income household about $1,700 extra each year.

PolitiFact Chief Correspondent Louis Jacobson, Senior Correspondent Amy Sherman, Staff Writers Jeff Cercone, Samantha Putterman, Sara Swann, Loreben Tuquero and Maria Ramirez Uribe contributed to this story. 

Our convention fact-checks rely on both new and previously reported work. We link to past work whenever possible. In some cases, a fact-check rating may be different tonight than in past versions. In those cases, either details of what the candidate said, or how the candidate said it, differed enough that we evaluated it anew.