Prep for the vice presidential debate with fact-checks on Vance and Walz

Republican Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will face off for the first time Oct. 1 at the CBS News vice presidential debate in New York City.
This is the only scheduled vice presidential debate for the 2024 election, and it comes just three weeks after the first, and likely only, presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
WATCH LIVE: Vance and Walz debate
PolitiFact has scrutinized more than a dozen recent statements from Vance and Walz since each man became his party’s VP nominee. Here’s how accurate their talking points have proven so far.
Vance was among the first politicians to spread the unsubstantiated claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were killing and eating pets. During the Sept. 10 presidential debate, Trump repeated this baseless rumor. In the weeks since, Vance has used selective data to exaggerate Springfield’s problems amid the migrant influx.
Vance cherry-picked crime data to link the immigration uptick to rising murders, saying they “are up by 81%.” From 2021 to 2023, murders in Springfield rose from five to nine — an 80% increase. But FBI homicide data also showed that the number of homicides in Springfield fluctuated without a clear trend from 2012 to 2022, and a crime data expert cautioned against making annual comparisons in places where less than one homicide is reported each month.
WATCH: The significance of Vance’s appearance at event hosted by far-right Christian nationalist
Vance also claimed the number of communicable diseases, such as HIV and tuberculosis, in Springfield have “skyrocketed” because of the increase in Haitian immigrants. This is Mostly False. Not including COVID-19 cases, the overall communicable disease rate in Clark County, where Springfield is, has generally dropped since 2018, with the exception of HIV cases. The county cautions that its rates may be inflated because 2020 Census data does not account for population increases. Public county data doesn’t separate case numbers by city or demographics, so public health experts cautioned against tying changes in case rates to immigrants.
When discussing immigrants in the U.S. more broadly, Vance mischaracterized one of Harris’ proposals, saying she “wants to give $25,000 to illegal aliens to buy American homes.” But Vance is filling in blanks about a proposal that we know little about. Harris has not detailed her plan or said who would qualify for this first-time homebuyer assistance.
Like Harris, Walz routinely works in warnings about Trump and Vance embracing proposals from Project 2025, even though the Trump-Vance campaign has distanced itself from the 900-page policy manual for the next Republican administration.
Walz said Vance “literally wrote the foreword for the architect of the Project 2025 agenda.” This is True. Vance wrote the foreword for Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ forthcoming book, “Dawn’s Early Light.” The Heritage Foundation led the network of groups that created the policy handbook.
READ MORE: What to expect from the Vance-Walz vice presidential debate
However, Walz has also wrongly described Project 2025’s goals. He falsely claimed it requires women to register with a new federal agency if they get pregnant. The manual does not mention, nor call for, a new federal agency to be created for pregnancy registration. It recommends that states provide more detailed and consistent abortion and miscarriage reporting to the federal government.
Vance has sought to negatively reframe Walz’s 24-year military career with the Nebraska and Minnesota National Guards. In August, Vance said, “When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, do you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him.”
This has an element of truth but misstates the timeline in ways that could leave a misleading impression, so Vance’s claim rates Mostly False. Walz retired from the Minnesota National Guard in May 2005 to run for Congress. He submitted retirement paperwork five to seven months beforehand.
After Walz filed congressional candidacy paperwork in February 2005, his Minnesota National Guard battalion received a March 2005 notification for a potential deployment within two years, not immediately. Walz’s battalion was not officially ordered to go to Iraq until July 2005, two months after Walz retired.
READ MORE: What history says about vice presidential debates — and why Tuesday could be different
Vance has also attacked Walz for saying in 2018 that he wanted to get “weapons of war that I carried in war” off the streets. Vance said Walz “has not spent a day in a combat zone,” which is True.
On Walz’s gubernatorial record, Vance said Walz enacted a law that would “take children away from their parents if the parents don’t want to consent to sex changes.” But that’s False, the law Walz signed does not do that. It amended the law governing which court could have temporary jurisdiction over child custody cases involving more than one state.
Walz has characterized the Trump-Vance campaign as antiunion, saying that when Trump was president, he “cut overtime benefits for millions of workers.” That’s Mostly False.
In 2016, former President Barack Obama’s administration set a rule that would have raised the salary threshold for overtime pay. But a judge struck it down before it took effect, and the incoming Trump administration dropped a challenge against the ruling. The Trump administration set its own rule to raise the salary threshold for overtime pay, which was lower than the Obama-era policy. The Trump rule did not amount to a “cut.”
Walz has also blamed Trump for racking up the federal government’s debt, saying Trump “added more to the national debt than any other president.” That’s Half True.
Looking at the increase in federal debt, Trump ranks first for debt added in a single term. However, Biden is projected to pass Trump’s total by the time he leaves office in January 2025. Using a different method — counting how much future debt a president’s policies created — Trump is projected to about double Biden’s debt amount.