2024 RNC fact-check: What Trump VP pick JD Vance got right, wrong in Milwaukee speech

MILWAUKEE — Newly minted Republican vice presidential nominee Ohio Sen. JD Vance delivered a speech to delegates heavy on his biography and economically populist views, zeroing in on the Midwest’s manufacturing heritage and future.

"President Trump represents America’s last, best hope to restore what is lost and may never be found again," Vance said in the final speech on the Republican National Convention’s third night. "A country where a working-class boy born far from the halls of power can stand on this stage as the next vice president of the United States of America."

At 39, Vance would be one of the youngest vice presidents in U.S. history, and the first millennial in the office, should former President Donald Trump win the presidential election in November.

Vance, who was elected to the Senate in 2022, was born in Middletown, Ohio, and rose to fame in 2016 after publishing his bestselling memoir "Hillbilly Elegy." Vance wrote about growing up amid poverty, detailing the isolation, violence and drug addiction that often surrounds poor white communities in Appalachia and the Rust Belt.

Vance served in the U.S. Marine Corps and worked as a corporate lawyer and venture capitalist.

During the 2016 presidential election, Vance was a frequent and vocal critic who questioned whether Trump was "America’s Hitler" and called him "reprehensible" and an "idiot." 

But during his Senate campaign, Vance mended ties with Trump. In recent months, he became a staunch Trump defender, as his name surfaced as a potential vice presidential pick.

Here, we fact-check five of Vance’s statements from his convention speech.

"There’s this chart that shows worker wages, and they stagnated for pretty much my entire life until President Donald J. Trump came along. Workers’ wages went through the roof."

This is exaggerated. Although wages stagnated for much of Vance’s life, there was no sharp divide after Trump’s election when wages skyrocketed.

A key metric for inflation-adjusted worker pay — median usual weekly inflation-adjusted earnings for full-time wage and salary workers — shows that this figure stagnated from 1984, when Vance was born, until the mid-2010s.

Then, after about 2014, when Democrat Barack Obama was president and Vance was in his early 30s, these earnings headed upward, climbing about 4% during his term’s final three years.

From the roughly three years between Trump’s inauguration to the coronavirus pandemic’s onset, this figure also rose about 4%. (Pandemic-era data points are unreliable because although wages seemed to spike, it was because lower-wage workers were more likely to be laid off, which raised the median wage of people who were still employed.)

Since the pandemic’s economic impact began subsiding around the start of 2022, this statistic has grown by about 2% in two and a half years under President Joe Biden. 

Trump "created the greatest economy in history for workers."

False.

The unemployment rate is the strongest evidence for this assertion. During Trump’s presidency, the unemployment rate fell to levels untouched in five decades. But his successor, Biden, matched or exceeded those levels.

The annual increases in gross domestic product — the sum of a country’s economic activity — were broadly similar under Trump to what they were during the final six years under his predecessor, Obama. And GDP growth under Trump was well below that of previous presidents.

Wage growth also didn’t set records under Trump. Adjusted for inflation, wages began rising during the Obama years and kept increasing under Trump. But these were modest compared with the 2% a year increase seen in the 1960s. 

Another metric — the growth rate in personal consumption per person, adjusted for inflation — wasn’t higher under Trump than previous presidents. For many families, this statistic serves an economic activity bottom line, determining how much they can spend on food, clothing, housing, health care and travel. 

In Trump’s three years in office through January 2020, real consumption per person grew by 2% a year. Of the 30 nonoverlapping three-year periods from 1929 to the end of his presidency, Trump’s periods ranked in the bottom third.

"Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico."

Half True.

Biden was a senator from Delaware when the North American Free Trade Agreement passed Congress in 1993, and he voted for it. (More Republicans voted for the agreement than Democrats.)

Whether it was a "bad trade deal" is a matter of opinion. But experts generally consider another target of Vance’s criticism — a liberalization of trade with China — to have caused more U.S. job losses than NAFTA.

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service summed up NAFTA’s legacy after two decades, seemingly rebutting Vance’s point about jobs going to Mexico: "NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters. The net overall effect of NAFTA on the U.S. economy appears to have been relatively modest."

Nevertheless, NAFTA hit some U.S. industries harder than others. Based on a 2012 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development study, workers at companies making everything from small home appliances to clothing took an economic hit, even as jobs were created elsewhere in the economy.

"Joe Biden supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq" while "Trump was right" on the war. 

Half True.

Biden voted in favor of a 2002 resolution that authorized then-President George W. Bush to enforce "all relevant" United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iraq and, if needed, to use military force against Iraq.

The U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003 and the conflict ended in 2011. Asked for evidence of Vance’s claim, his team referred us to that vote.

Biden in July 2003 criticized the Bush administration’s strategy, saying the U.S. went to war too soon, without enough troops and without enough countries supporting the effort.

Vance said Trump was "right" on this issue "while Biden was wrong." But Trump also supported the Iraq War early on before growing skeptical a year later. 

In 2002, when asked whether he supported the invasion, Trump said, "Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly." In a 2004 Esquire article, Trump was more critical, saying, "Look at the war in Iraq and the mess that we're in. I would never have handled it that way."

My cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky is now in "one of the 10 poorest counties in the entire United States of America."

Half True. 

Vance’s family cemetery plot is in Breathitt County, Kentucky, the nonprofit news organization Kansas Reflector reported. Data shows that Breathitt County is very poor, but we did not find support for Vance’s statistic.

Breathitt is one of the 10 poorest counties in Kentucky. 2022 U.S. Census Bureau data shows its median household income is the ninth lowest of the state’s 120 counties.

And although it is also among the poorest counties in the country, we did not find data showing it is in the bottom 10. We contacted Vance for evidence, but his team did not provide data before publication.

Census data shows that, in 2022, out of more than 3,100 U.S. counties or other regional equivalents, Breathitt County had the 36th-lowest median household income. That puts it in the bottom 1% of all counties in the nation.

2022 Census data also said 30.1% of people in Breathitt County live below the federal poverty threshold, which showed a family of four earning $27,750 as living in poverty. Out of all U.S. counties and equivalent regions, Breathitt County had the 60th-highest percentage of people in poverty. Among Kentucky counties, it had the 10th-highest percentage of people in poverty.

We will update this report if Vance’s team gets back to us.

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PolitiFact Chief Correspondent Louis Jacobson, Staff Writers Madison Czopek, Ranjan Jindal, Sara Swann, Maria Ramirez Uribe and Researcher Caryn Baird 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.