Kamala Harris exaggerates scale of prepandemic manufacturing job losses

During Vice President Kamala Harris’ first solo television network interview since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, she sought to compare the nation’s manufacturing sector during her tenure with former President Donald Trump’s time in office.

During the Sept. 25 interview, MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle asked Harris about Americans’ concerns about the economy. When Harris said Trump handed the incoming Biden-Harris administration a weak economy, Ruhle noted that that was during the pandemic. Harris replied, "Even before the pandemic, he lost manufacturing jobs, by most people’s estimates at least 200,000."

Harris is correct that manufacturing stumbled under Trump before the COVID-19 pandemic. But the 200,000 jobs figure she cites includes manufacturing job losses during Trump’s entire presidency, not just the prepandemic period.

The Harris campaign pointed PolitiFact to more accurate phrasing Harris had used earlier the same day, when she told an audience in Pittsburgh, "All told, almost 200,000 manufacturing jobs were lost during his presidency, starting before the pandemic hit."

Harris is on safe ground in pointing to a prepandemic manufacturing downturn, as we’ve reported. Manufacturing output was declining for more than a year before the pandemic’s 2020 start.

One way to measure this is a Bureau of Labor Statistics statistic, calculated quarterly,  called inflation-adjusted output for all manufacturing workers. This statistic compares how much higher or lower output was in a given quarter with the same quarter in the previous year.

This metric showed that manufacturing output reached an 11-year peak in 2018’s third quarter, during Trump’s presidency. The growth continued in the next quarter but slowed. Then, in 2019’s first quarter, the year-over-year change turned negative, partly because of a trade war with China, and it remained negative in each of the four subsequent quarters. 

A similar statistic — the Federal Reserve’s industrial production index — mirrored this pattern. This monthly statistic fell by about 2.4% from August 2018 to February 2020.

Collectively, these metrics show weakening in the sector, Tara Sinclair, a George Washington University economist, told PolitiFact in July.

The prepandemic decline was "chump change compared with the drop that occurred in the COVID-19 recession," Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, told us in July. Still, these metrics show that "real output was falling even before COVID-19 infections began to soar."

News outlets described a manufacturing recession at the time; a January 2020 report by The Washington Post was headlined, "U.S. manufacturing was in a mild recession during 2019, a sore spot for the economy." 

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Harris’ remark paired an accurate observation — that manufacturing was declining before the pandemic — with an employment number that also included the pandemic years.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that manufacturing sector employment fell by 48,000 from its prepandemic peak in January 2019 to February 2020, the month before the pandemic hit the U.S. That’s a quarter of the number of jobs Harris said were lost before the pandemic.

Harris cited 200,000 job losses, a figure that is closer to the net losses for Trump’s entire presidency, which was about 178,000. 

Harris said, "Even before the pandemic, (Trump) lost manufacturing jobs, by most people’s estimates at least 200,000."

She’s right that the manufacturing sector tipped into a downturn at least a year before the pandemic, measured both by jobs and output.

But the prepandemic job losses were 48,000. About 200,000 manufacturing jobs were lost during Trump’s entire tenure, not just the prepandemic period. This is significant because the pandemic losses were largely because of extenuating factors outside Trump’s control.

We rate the statement Mostly False.