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

CHICAGO — PolitiFact is live fact-checking the second night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, including the keynote speech by former President Barack Obama. 

We also fact-checked the first night of the DNC, including speeches by President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others. 

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

Please continue to check back as we update this story.

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 the entirety of his tenure, they have trailed inflation, which hit a four-decade high under Biden. However, 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.

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.

PolitiFact Chief Correspondent Louis Jacobson, Senior Correspondent Amy Sherman, Staff Writers 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.