Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley — a former governor of South Carolina and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during former President Donald Trump’s administration — made a few false and misleading statements in a June 4 town hall on CNN:

• Haley falsely said that crime as at “all-time highs.” The U.S. violent crime rate, and homicide rate specifically, peaked in 1991.

• She said “all those medicines” at “your local drugstore” are made in China, but only a portion of foreign-made pharmaceutical ingredients are from China.

• Haley wrongly said that Roe v. Wade allowed “abortion anytime, anywhere, for any reason.” The court ruling said states could prohibit abortion after fetal viability, with exceptions only for the life and health of the mother.

• When discussing climate change, Haley said the U.S. is “very good when it comes to emissions” and China and India “are causing the problem.” But the U.S. emits more carbon dioxide than India and emits more CO2 per capita than both countries.

• She repeated the misleading GOP talking point that the IRS is “going after” middle-class taxpayers. Enforcement efforts to collect unpaid taxes will focus on those earning more than $400,000, the Biden administration has said.

The town hall was held in Des Moines, Iowa.

Crime Isn’t at ‘All-Time Highs’

The U.S. violent crime rate hit its peak in the early 1990s. But in talking about maintaining gun rights for people to bear arms and “protect and defend their families,” Haley falsely said that “you’ve got crime at all-time highs.”

According to FBI data, the nationwide violent crime rate was at its highest in 1991 with 758.2 crimes per 100,000 people. In 2020, the rate was 398.5, and the FBI said that “violent and property crime remained consistent between 2020 and 2021,” the most recent year for which annual national figures are available.

The nationwide homicide rate also peaked in 1991, at 9.8 per 100,000 population. By 2019, it was down to 5.1. During the pandemic, there was an increase in murders, but nothing that approached the 1991 all-time high. And crime data indicate the number of murders in large cities has dropped since 2021.

The nationwide murder rate went up from 2019 to 2020, to 6.5 per 100,000 people, and the FBI said the number (not the rate) went up slightly in 2021, but not by a statistically significant amount. We don’t yet have 2022 figures from the FBI. But the Major Cities Chiefs Association found that the number of murders in 70 large U.S. cities declined from 2021 to 2022.

AH Datalytics, an independent group that collects publicly available information from large U.S. law enforcement agencies, has found a 12% decrease in murders so far this year, compared with the same time period in 2022. Most of the agencies had statistics through late April or late May as of June 5.

Not ‘All’ Medicines Made in China

Haley said “all those medicines” at “your local drugstore” are made in China, but that’s not right. According to the Food and Drug Administration, nearly three-quarters of pharmaceutical ingredients are foreign-made, but China only represents a portion of that.

“What I do care about is if it’s a national security risk,” Haley said. “When you saw we had COVID, they told you to put on a mask. The masks were made in China. They told you to take a home COVID test. You turned it over, it was made in China. You go down to your local drugstore, all those medicines are made in China.”

It’s unclear from her lead-in whether Haley was talking about all drugs in general, or just COVID-19 drugs, when she said they were “all” made in China. But it’s not accurate for either.

A fact sheet from Pfizer, which makes the antiviral pill Paxlovid, says that the primary manufacturing sites for the drug are in Germany, Ireland and Italy.

An intravenous antiviral drug used to treat COVID-19, remdesivir, is manufactured in sites all over the world, including in China. Gilead Sciences, which invented remdesivir, lists a manufacturing network that includes two countries in Asia (China and Japan), eight in Europe, and two in North America (Mexico and the U.S.). The manufacturing process also requires obtaining chemicals “from around the world – including France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Canada, the United States, China and Japan.”

“No one country or region can manufacture remdesivir on its own and meet the level of supply required,” a Gilead press release states. “The raw materials and substances required, and the production capabilities and capacity required, represent a diverse network of companies that are working together to meet the needs of patients around the world. Any disruption in this supply chain could ultimately reduce the amount of remdesivir that could be produced and increase the time it takes to do so.”

If Haley was talking more generally about all pharmaceutical drugs, the FDA in 2019 said 72% of active pharmaceutical ingredients, or APIs, supplying the U.S. market are foreign made. The FDA said 13% of APIs are made in China, though it noted that “the number of registered facilities making APIs in China more than doubled between 2010 and 2019.”

Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, testified in October 2019 that “although CDER can describe the locations of API manufacturing facilities, we cannot determine with any precision the volume of API that China is actually producing, or the volume of APIs manufactured in China that is entering the U.S. market, either directly or indirectly by incorporation into finished dosages manufactured in China or other parts of the world.”

The FDA says it “inspects pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities worldwide, including facilities that manufacture active ingredients and the finished product.”

Abortion

The Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision established a constitutional right to abortion, but said that the government could restrict abortions after fetal viability, provided there was an exception for cases involving risks to the life and health of the mother. Haley, however, wrongly said Roe “suddenly said abortion anytime, anywhere, for any reason,” adding that “all Americans had to succumb to that.”

The court ruling said states couldn’t restrict the right to an abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy; in the second trimester, states could restrict abortion “in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health.” And after a fetus is viable outside the womb, states could restrict or prohibit abortion with only exceptions for the life and health of the mother. Roe put viability at 24 to 28 weeks of gestation, but a subsequent ruling said viability is determined by the physician.

In a companion case decided with Roe, the court clarified that health referred to both physical and mental health. As we’ve written, some Republicans have objected to the inclusion of “mental” health, seeing it as a loophole. But it’s simply not true that Roe allowed any abortion at “any time” across the country.

Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe last year, nearly all states had restrictions on abortion — some challenging the Roe framework but others abiding by the viability threshold, according to a breakdown of the various state laws by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group that supports abortion rights.

Carbon Dioxide Emissions

For years, the U.S. has been the world’s second largest emitter of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. But Haley claimed that China and India are “the problem” when it comes to improving the environment – not the U.S.

“The United States is very good when it comes to emissions,” Haley said. “If we want to really fix the environment, then let’s start having serious conversations with India and China. They are our polluters. They’re the ones that are causing the problem.”

In 2021, China, by a wide margin, ranked first in metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted, according to the European Commission’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research. Trailing China were the U.S., the European Union and India, in that order.

We should note that, generally, U.S. emissions have been declining while the emissions of the rest of the top four have been increasing.

In terms of emissions per capita, however, the U.S. ranked higher than China and India. The U.S. emitted an average of 14.24 tons per person, and China’s and India’s averages were 8.73 and 1.90 tons per person, respectively.

China and India have populations of about 1.4 billion, while the U.S. population is approaching 335 million, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

IRS

When discussing the need to “go back to being fiscally responsible,” Haley repeated a GOP talking point that the IRS under President Joe Biden is “going after” middle-class taxpayers.

Haley: Instead of the 87,000 IRS workers going after middle America, let’s go after the hundreds of billions of dollars of COVID fraud that we know exist.

Haley is referring to the Inflation Reduction Act, which became law in August and included $79.6 billion for the IRS over 10 years to improve technology, customer service and enforcement efforts to collect unpaid taxes. A Treasury Department spokesperson has told us that the IRS would use the funding to “fill positions of the 50,000 IRS employees who are on the verge of retirement” and increase its staffing by about 30,000.

But, as we have written, the Biden administration has said the stepped-up enforcement program will focus on taxpayers earning more than $400,000.

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen directed IRS Commissioner Charles P. Rettig on Aug. 10 not to use the new funding “to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels.”

In an Aug. 25 letter to the ranking Republicans on the House Budget Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the increased IRS funding for enforcement would raise an additional $180.4 billion over 10 years. But only “a small fraction” of that would come from taxpayers earning less than $400,000, “because, CBO expects, the IRS will follow the Secretary’s directive, and enforcement resources will focus on what the Secretary terms high-end noncompliance,” the letter stated.

It is also worth noting that the debt limit legislation signed into law by Biden on June 3 would cancel $1.4 billion of that new IRS funding. “CBO anticipates that rescinding those funds would result in fewer enforcement actions” and $2.3 billion in less revenues over the next decade, CBO said.

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made his presidential candidacy official on May 24, first with a glitch-delayed livestream on Twitter Spaces, followed by an interview on Fox News.

Making his pitch for the Republican nomination, DeSantis leaned heavily into his record as governor of the Sunshine State, and criticism of President Joe Biden. But we found that in some instances, DeSantis presented a distorted or incomplete picture.

• DeSantis said that Florida “eliminated critical race theory,” even though there is little or no evidence that it was being taught in public schools.

• DeSantis blamed “woke ideology” for recent military recruitment struggles, but the Army secretary said a 2022 survey found that “wokeness” was “relatively low on the list of barriers to service.”

• The governor described “global warming” as “not central to the mission” of the military, but Pentagon leaders have warned for years that climate change poses a national security threat.

• DeSantis repeatedly boasted that “Florida’s crime rate is at a 50-year low.” The rate has been declining for decades, and crime experts have cautioned that the 2021 data cannot be compared to prior years while the state transitions to a new method of crime reporting.

• DeSantis suggested that California wants “abortion all the way up till birth” and already allows it “post-birth.” But infanticide is illegal in the state, and a voter-approved ballot measure that guarantees access to abortion doesn’t mention abortions after fetal viability.

• He labeled claims of Florida book bans a “hoax” because “there’s not been a single book banned” in the state. But a nonprofit counted hundreds of books that were removed from Florida schools and libraries to comply with bills DeSantis signed into law.

• DeSantis misleadingly portrayed the risks of climate change by narrowly focusing only on the frequency of hurricanes, ignoring that it will make hurricanes wetter and more intense.

• He boasted that Florida “recently ranked number one in education” — a ranking that DeSantis inherited and is based on both elementary and higher education. The state’s K-12 schools ranked 14th.

DeSantis’ 2024 kickoff got off to a rough start when the Twitter Spaces livestream event crashed, and was delayed nearly a half hour. But the event, hosted by owner Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur David Sacks, eventually got back on track. “I’m here,” DeSantis announced after a restart.

“Well, I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American comeback,” DeSantis said.

The Twitter event was followed by a live interview on Fox News with host Trey Gowdy, a former Republican member of Congress from South Carolina. Below are some of the statements we fact-checked from both public appearances.

On Critical Race Theory

DeSantis said in his Twitter Space announcement that Florida “eliminated critical race theory,” even though there is little or no evidence that it was being taught in public schools.

DeSantis, May 24: On the racial history, we eliminated critical race theory from our K through 12 schools. That was the right thing to do. In other words, we’re not going to take a kid who comes in at six years old and say they’re an oppressor or oppressed based on what their race is. That’s divisive. That’s wrong.

DeSantis is referring to the Individual Freedom Act, which he signed last year. The law doesn’t mention the phrase “critical race theory.” Instead, it bans public school teachers and Florida College System instructors from teaching that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

What is critical race theory? It started as an advanced legal theory taught at Harvard University in the 1980s by law professor Derrick Bell. It accepts that institutional racism exists and needs to be better understood in order to address racial inequality. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Harvard law student at the time who is now a law professor at Columbia University, has been credited with coining the phrase “critical race theory.”

In an opinion piece for the American Bar Association in January 2021, Janel George, a civil rights attorney, described CTR as “a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship.” A year later, at her Senate confirmation hearings, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson defined it as “an academic theory that’s at the law school level.”

Most teachers say critical race theory isn’t being taught in K-12 schools. In 2021, the Association of American Educators surveyed more than 1,000 educators and 96% of those surveyed said they were not required to teach critical race theory.

In a 2022 report on state efforts to ban critical race theory in public schools, UCLA education researchers wrote that critical race theory isn’t being taught in K-12 schools. They said the term “critical race theory” has been co-opted by conservative activists who seek “to restrict or ‘ban’ curriculum, lessons, professional development, and district equity and diversity efforts addressing … race, racism, diversity, and inclusion.”

UCLA researchers found that the debate over CRT has played out in nearly 900 school districts with an enrollment of more than 17.7 million students, or 35% of all public school students in the U.S.

Effect of ‘Wokeness’ on Military Recruiting

DeSantis rightly noted that military recruitment has struggled in recent years, but he was wrong to lay blame on concerns about “woke ideology” in the armed services. An Army study of young people in 2022 found the main reason people didn’t want to serve in the military was fear of injury or death.

Concerns about “wokeness in the military” ranked “relatively low on the list of barriers to service,” according to Army Secretary Christine Wormuth.

“We will never surrender to the woke mob and we will leave woke ideology in the dust bin of history,” DeSantis said in his Twitter announcement. “Biden’s also politicized the military and caused recruiting to plummet. We will eliminate ideological agendas from our military, focus the military on the core mission, and we will reverse the poor recruiting trends.”

DeSantis echoed those comments in his Fox interview later that night.

“There’ll be a new sheriff in town as commander in chief,” DeSantis said of taking over the presidency. “And I think you’ll see recruiting start to get back to where it needs to be, because people don’t want to join a woke military. And I think it’s been really, really problematic.”

Military recruiters have been feeling the pinch for years. The Army missed its Fiscal Year 2022 recruiting goals by 25% or 15,000 soldiers, and military leaders said in April they did not expect to reach their recruiting targets in 2023 either.

“The difficult recruiting landscape we face didn’t happen in a year, and it’s going to take us more than a year to turn this around,” Wormuth said at a House Armed Services Committee hearing in April.

For one thing, they are drawing on a smaller pool of eligible applicants. A 2020 Pentagon study found that without a waiver 77% of young Americans would not qualify for military service due to obesity, drug abuse, physical and mental health problems and other issues. That’s 6% higher than in 2017.

“To put it bluntly, I am worried we are now in the early days of a long-term threat to the all-volunteer force. [There is] a small and declining number of Americans who are eligible and interested in military service,” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in April 2022. Tillis said “every single metric tracking the military recruiting environment is going in the wrong direction.”

In her congressional testimony in April, Wormuth said the Army surveyed 2,400 people between the ages of 16 and 28 to try to identify obstacles to service. “There was, sometimes, a fear of psychological harm, or a fear of leaving friends and family, and then after that it was, sort of, a fear of the Army, somehow putting your life on hold,” Wormuth said.

Culture war issues did not register as significant obstacles to recruitment.

“Concerns about, for example, you know, wokeness in the military or the COVID vaccine mandate, for example, those were relatively low on the list of barriers to service,” Wormuth said.

Global Warming and the Military

DeSantis went on to say that “global warming” and other “matters not central to the mission” are hurting military morale and recruiting.

DeSantis, May 24: But when revered institutions like those in our military are more concerned with matters not central to the mission, whether it’s global warming or gender ideology and pronouns, morale declines and recruiting suffers.

But contrary to DeSantis’ assessment that global warming is not a central mission of the military, Pentagon leaders have warned for years that climate change poses a national security threat.

In a report released in October 2014, the Pentagon wrote that “Climate change will affect the Department of Defense’s ability to defend the Nation and poses immediate risks to U.S. national security,” and that it “will have real impacts on our military and the way it executes its missions.”

“Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict,” the report stated. “They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe.”

The report calls climate change a “threat multiplier,” meaning it “has the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today – from infectious disease to terrorism.”

In written testimony obtained by Pro Publica and provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee after his confirmation hearing in January 2017, Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, James Mattis, said: “Climate change can be a driver of instability and the Department of Defense must pay attention to potential adverse impacts generated by this phenomenon.”

“I agree that the effects of a changing climate — such as increased maritime access to the Arctic, rising sea levels, desertification, among others — impact our security situation,” Mattis said. “I will ensure that the department continues to be prepared to conduct operations today and in the future, and that we are prepared to address the effects of a changing climate on our threat assessments, resources, and readiness.”

Mark Esper, a Trump nominee who succeeded Mattis as secretary of defense, testified before a House committee in February 2020 that he did not believe climate change was “a threat to our national security as I’ve traditionally defined it.” But, he said, “I do believe it is a challenge for our military installations that are confronted with the impact of climate change.”

At that same hearing, Gen. Mark Milley, Trump’s selection as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified that climate change “is probably going to result in destabilization, with resource depletion, water and things like that. You’re gonna see things like increases in diseases. There are a lot of second and third order effects. And does it impact on U.S. national security? Yes it does.”

Florida Crime Rate

During his Twitter and Fox interviews, DeSantis repeatedly boasted that “Florida’s crime rate is at a 50-year low.” But experts caution not to read too much into the 2021 data, because there was a significant switch that year in the way data was reported, and much of Florida’s law enforcement community had not switched to the new reporting method.

According to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Florida’s overall crime rate — which includes violent and property crimes — was 1,952.3 crimes per 100,000 residents, a roughly 9.5% drop from the rate in 2020. (DeSantis took office in January 2019.)

That 2021 rate was the lowest going back to 1971, which is as far back as the state reports the statistic. So that makes it the lowest total crime rate in at least the last 50 years, as DeSantis said.

But the rate has been steadily declining for three decades. In fact, the state has achieved the lowest crime rate on record in every year since 2008, including DeSantis’ first two years in office.

Data experts also caution there is a large caveat with the 2021 data that makes comparisons to previous years precarious. For 2021, the FBI switched to a new method of crime data reporting, using an “incident-based” system instead of a “summary-based” one in which only the most egregious offenses in an incident are reported, even when multiple crimes may have been committed.

In Florida, 239 law enforcement agencies representing 57.5% of the state’s population submitted data using the old, summary-based crime statistics in 2021. In addition, 29 law enforcement agencies had transitioned to incident-based crime reporting, and another 140 were in the process of transitioning.

FDLE says the new incident-based reporting method will provide “more robust and dynamic crime reporting.” But until data is collected uniformly, comparisons to previous years may be skewed.

“I would say these are provisional data and should be treated with some caution,” Richard B. Rosenfeld, a criminologist and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told the Tampa Bay Times in December.

“The drastic differences in numbers of agencies reporting, and the different way that crime data is recorded, means that comparing 2021 data to earlier years is problematic,” Lyndsay Boggess, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida, told PolitiFact. “Even 2020 is challenging and potentially unreliable given the pandemic, quarantine, and shifts in peoples’ behaviors.

Abortion

In the Gowdy interview, DeSantis said he is concerned about a “Democratic administration, with a trifecta, trying to nationalize abortion all the way up until birth,” which he called “a violation of what states like Florida have done to protect life.”

As we’ve written, House Democrats did pass the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2021, which would prevent state prohibitions on abortion after fetal viability in cases where the life or health of the patient is at risk. Some Republicans have claimed or suggested the bill would allow abortion at any point in a pregnancy and for any reason — but some Democrats have countered that is not what they support nor the intent of the bill.

It’s already very rare for abortions to be performed late into a pregnancy. The most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show that 93.1% of abortions were performed at or before 13 weeks of gestation and less than 1% were performed at or after 21 weeks.

DeSantis later called out California specifically, saying: “They want to have abortion all the way up till birth. I think they actually allow it post-birth, if you can believe that, which I think is truly horrific.”

To start, California does not allow abortions “post-birth,” which is known as infanticide. “That’s just not true,” Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis, said of the claim. “That’s homicide in California,” she told us in a phone interview.

In addition, the California Health and Safety Code, which contains relevant state statutes, clearly states, “The rights to medical treatment of an infant prematurely born alive in the course of an abortion shall be the same as the rights of an infant of similar medical status prematurely born spontaneously.”

In 2022, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 2223, legislation that protects parents from being investigated or prosecuted if they lose or choose to end a pregnancy. As we’ve also written, there was some concern about the original language of the bill, which said: “Notwithstanding any other law, a person shall not be subject to civil or criminal liability or penalty, or otherwise deprived of their rights, based on their actions or omissions with respect to their pregnancy or actual, potential, or alleged pregnancy outcome, including miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion, or perinatal death.”

The state’s Assembly Judiciary Committee later suggested revising the language to make it clear that the reference to “perinatal death” — which can refer to fetal deaths that occur during a pregnancy or deaths within days or weeks of a birth — “is intended to be the consequence of a pregnancy complication.” Without that clarification, the committee said, “the bill could be interpreted to immunize a pregnant person from all criminal penalties for all pregnancy outcomes, including the death of a newborn for any reason during the ‘perinatal’ period after birth, including a cause of death which is not attributable to pregnancy complications, which clearly is not the author’s intent.”

The line was changed to read “perinatal death due to causes that occurred in utero,” which is the version that became law. After the change, the California Catholic Conference, which had objected to the original language, removed its opposition to the measure and remained neutral on the bill.

Also, California law already places restrictions on abortions that occur after fetal viability — contrary to the DeSantis claim that the state wants abortion “way up till birth.”

In 2022, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, California voters approved Proposition 1, an amendment to the state constitution that guarantees access to abortion procedures and contraceptives.

But the language of the amendment doesn’t specify when abortions may occur, Ziegler told us. “It’s silent on the subject” of viability, she said, explaining that constitutional amendments “tend to be broad and abstract,” rather than going into specific details.

It “doesn’t mean you can or cannot have a post-viability abortion,” she said of the amendment. That would have to be “tested in court,” which she noted has not happened.

Book Bans

DeSantis played down the fact that hundreds of books have been removed from Florida schools and libraries to comply with legislation that he has signed into law as governor.

“So the whole book ban thing is a hoax,” he told his Twitter audience. “There’s not been a single book banned in the state of Florida. You can go buy or use whatever book you want.”

But PEN America, a nonprofit promoting “free expression” that has been tracking book removals across the country, has documented hundreds of bans by Florida school districts between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2022.

In an April report, PEN America wrote: “In Florida, for example, a trio of laws enacted this school year bar instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade (HB 1557), prohibit educators from discussing advantages or disadvantages based on race (HB 7), and mandate that schools must catalog every book on their shelves, including those found in classroom libraries (HB 1467). Due to the lack of clear guidance, these three laws have each led teachers, media specialists, and school administrators to proactively remove books from shelves, in the absence of any specific challenges. In October 2022, the Florida Board of Education also passed new rules that go beyond the language in the laws, to stipulate that teachers found in violation of these bills could have their professional teaching certification revoked.”

The group said it counted at least 357 book bans throughout the state.

In a March press release purportedly “exposing the book ban hoax,” the governor’s office even acknowledged that “[s]chool districts are required to report the number of books removed from schools based on legislation passed in 2022,” and noted that about two dozen districts had “reported removing materials” so far.

Climate Change

In his first interview following his announcement, DeSantis misleadingly denied the very real risks of climate change by narrowly focusing on a single metric: hurricane frequency.

“They have not increased in number,” DeSantis said of hurricanes, when Fox News host Trey Gowdy asked DeSantis about his “view” on climate change, and the government’s role in addressing it.  “People try to say when we had Ian that it was because of climate change. But if you look at the first 60 years, from 1900 to 1960, we had more major hurricanes hit Florida than in the 60 years since then.”

“This is something that’s a fact of life in the Sunshine State,” he continued. “I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.”

Exactly how climate change affects hurricanes is complicated, but scientists generally agree that hotter temperatures will make hurricanes wetter and more intense.

“Further warming will likely lead to an increased proportion of [tropical cyclones] of higher severity (category 4 & 5) with more damaging wind speeds, higher storm inundation, and more extreme rainfall rates,” a 2021 review concluded. 

Hurricanes are tropical cyclones that occur in the Atlantic Ocean, among other bodies of water.

Whether a warming world will lead to more or fewer hurricanes is less clear — the bulk of the evidence points to fewer total hurricanes, although this remains uncertain.

Regardless of any specific effects on the storms, climate change-caused sea level rise means the hurricanes that do hit will be more likely to have higher storm surges.

As for DeSantis’ straw man claim about last year’s Hurricane Ian, he’s right that it’s incorrect to say that the hurricane was caused by climate change. But rather than causing events, climate change can make them more likely or worse.

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab climate scientist Michael Wehner and colleagues performed a rapid attribution analysis at the time of Hurricane Ian, concluding that climate change increased rainfall “by over 10%.” Wehner has since updated the estimate, he said during a lecture in March, and his group now estimates that climate change increased Hurricane Ian’s extreme rainfall by nearly 18%.

Of course, hurricanes are not the only concern when it comes to climate change. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report, released in March, human-caused climate change “​​is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe,” leading to “widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people.”

Florida’s Education Ranking

During his Twitter Spaces event, DeSantis said Florida “recently ranked number one in education” — a ranking that requires some context.

It’s true that U.S. News & World Report earlier this month ranked Florida No. 1 in overall education, which is based on both elementary and higher education. Florida has held the top spot for seven years — so it predates DeSantis, who took office in 2019.

Also, while Florida ranked No. 1 in higher education and overall education, the state’s K-12 schools ranked 14th.

The Sunshine State’s eighth-grade students ranked 32nd in math proficiency and 21st in reading proficiency, the news magazine said, citing the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress scores.

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Summary

Here’s how things have changed in the U.S. so far under President Joe Biden, who announced on April 25 that he is officially running for reelection:

• The economy added 12.6 million jobs under Biden, putting the total 3.2 million higher than before the pandemic.

• The unemployment rate dropped back to 3.5%; unfilled job openings surged, with nearly 1.7 for every unemployed job seeker.

• Inflation roared back to the highest level in over 40 years, then slowed markedly. In all, consumer prices are up nearly 15%. Gasoline is up 54%.

• Weekly earnings rose briskly, by 11.3%. But after adjusting for inflation, “real” weekly earnings went down 3.6%.

• People apprehended for entering the U.S. illegally from Mexico has increased by 342%.

• Domestic crude oil production has increased 5.7%, and crude oil imports are up almost 6.7%.

• The economy grew at 2.1% last year, despite high inflation and concerns about a possible recession.

• The population without health insurance dropped by 1.6 percentage points.

• The number of people receiving federal food assistance has increased by about 1.2%.

• Despite a decline in 2022, the number of murders in 70 large U.S. cities has now gone up by 1.6%.

• The stock markets have underperformed. The S&P 500-stock index is up nearly 7% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up almost 8%, while the NASDAQ composite index is down 10.2%.

Analysis

This is our sixth installment of “Biden’s Numbers,” which we started in January 2022 and have updated since then every three months.

As we have done for former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, we’ve included the latest statistics from the most authoritative sources to provide a sense of how the country is performing. These statistics may or may not reflect the president’s policies. We make no attempt to render any judgments on how much blame or credit a president deserves. Opinions will vary on that.

Our next Biden’s Numbers article will appear in July.

Jobs and Unemployment

The number of people with jobs has increased dramatically since Biden took office, far surpassing pre-pandemic levels.

Employment — The U.S. economy added 12,600,000 jobs between Biden’s inauguration and March, the latest month for which data are available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The March figure is 3,198,000 higher than the February 2020 peak of employment before COVID-19 forced massive shutdowns and layoffs.

One major category of jobs is still lagging, however. Government employment is still 314,000 jobs short of the pre-pandemic peak. That includes 130,000 fewer public school teachers and other local education workers. 

Unemployment — The unemployment rate fell from 6.3% at the time Biden took office to 3.5% in March — a decline of 2.8 percentage points. The current rate is exactly where it was in the months just before the pandemic.

That’s uncommonly low. Since 1948, when BLS began keeping records, the jobless rate has been at or below 3.5% for only 61 months — including five months during Biden’s time and three months during the Trump years, just before the pandemic. Previously, the rate hadn’t been so low since the 1960s.

Job Openings — The number of unfilled job openings soared, reaching a record of over 12 million in March of last year, but then declined after the Federal Reserve began a steep series of interest rate increases aimed at cooling the economy to bring down price inflation.

The number of unfilled jobs has slipped down to just 9.9 million as of the last business day of February, the most recent month on record. That’s still an increase of over 2.8 million openings — or 38.4% — during Biden’s time.

In February, there was an average of nearly 1.7 jobs for every unemployed job seeker. When Biden took office, there were fewer jobs than unemployed job seekers.

The number of job openings in March is set to be released May 2.

Labor Force Participation — One reason many job openings go unfilled is that millions of Americans left the workforce during the pandemic and haven’t returned. The labor force participation rate (the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work) has slowly recovered during Biden’s time, from 61.3% in January 2021 to 62.6% in March.

That still leaves the rate well short of the pre-pandemic level of 63.3% for February 2020.

The rate peaked at 67.3% more than two decades ago, during the first four months of 2000. Labor Department economists project that the rate will trend down to 60.1% in 2031, “primarily because of an aging population.”

Manufacturing Jobs — During the presidential campaign, Biden promised he had a plan to create a million new manufacturing jobs — and whether it’s his doing or not, the number is rising briskly.

As of March, the U.S. added 787,000 manufacturing jobs during Biden’s time, a 6.5% increase in the space of 26 months, according to BLS. Furthermore, the March total is 198,000 or 1.5% above the number of manufacturing jobs in February 2020, before the pandemic forced plant closures and layoffs.

During Trump’s four years, the economy lost 182,000 manufacturing jobs, or 1.4%, largely due to the pandemic.

Wages and Inflation

CPI — Inflation came roaring back under Biden but has slowed dramatically in recent months.

Overall, during his first 26 months in office the Consumer Price Index rose 14.9%.

It was for a time the worst inflation in decades. The 12 months ending last June saw a 9.1% increase in the CPI (before seasonal adjustment), which the Bureau of Labor Statistics said was the biggest such increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

But now inflation is trending down. The CPI rose 5.0% in the most recent 12 months, 1.8% in the most recent six months and only 0.1% in March.

Gasoline Prices — The price of gasoline has gyrated wildly under Biden.

During the first year and a half of his administration, the national average price of regular gasoline at the pump soared to a record high of just over $5 per gallon (in the week ending last June 13). The rise was propelled first by motorists resuming travel and the commerce surging back after pandemic lockdowns, and then by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, which disrupted oil markets as the West attempted to punish Russia, the world’s third-largest oil producer. 

Since then, the price drifted down to a low of $3.09 the week ending Dec. 26, and now has gone up again to $3.66 the week ending April 24, the most recent on record.

That’s $1.28 higher than in the week before Biden took office, an increase of 54%.

Wages — Wages also have gone up under Biden, but not as fast as prices.

Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers went up 11.3% during Biden’s first 26 months in office, according to monthly figures compiled by the BLS. Those production and nonsupervisory workers make up 81% of all employees in the private sector.

But inflation ate up all that gain and more. “Real” weekly earnings, which are adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, actually declined 3.6% since Biden took office.

That’s despite a recent upturn as inflation has moderated. Since June of last year, real earnings have gone up 1.1%.

Economic Growth

Despite two straight quarters of contraction at the beginning of 2022 and fears of a recession, the U.S. economy expanded for the full year in 2022 and continued to grow in the first quarter of 2023.

The U.S. real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product increased 2.1% in 2022 — buoyed by stronger-than-expected third and fourth quarters.

In a March 30 release, the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated that real GDP increased in the third quarter at an annualized rate of 3.2% and in the fourth quarter at a rate of 2.6%.

The growth continued in the first quarter of 2023, but at a slower pace. In its first estimate issued April 27, the BEA said the economy increased at an annual rate of 1.1% in the first quarter.

Still, concerns about a recession remain.

The Conference Board, a nonpartisan business membership and research organization, estimates that the probability of a recession within the next 12 months stands at nearly 99%.

“While US GDP growth defied expectations in late 2022 and early 2023 data has shown unexpected strength, we continue to forecast that GDP growth to contract for three consecutive quarters starting in Q2 2023,” the Conference Board said in an April 12 report on its U.S. recession probability model, citing “the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes and tightening monetary policy.”

In a sustained effort to slow inflation, the Federal Reserve has repeatedly raised interest rates — most recently on March 22, when it raised rates for the ninth time in 12 months.

Corporate Profits

Under Biden, corporate profits continued to set new records — although recent quarters haven’t been as strong.

After-tax corporate profits increased for the seventh consecutive year in 2022, reaching a new high of $2.87 trillion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The record, though, came despite a decline in growth in the last two quarters of the year.

During the third quarter of 2022, corporate profits were estimated at an annual rate of nearly $2.9 trillion — down slightly from the $3 trillion record set in the previous quarter, according to the BEA. That slide continued in the fourth quarter, when profits were running at a yearly rate of $2.7 trillion.

Even with the recent decline in growth, corporate profits were 36% higher than the full-year figure for 2020, the year before Biden took office, as estimated by the BEA. (See line 45.)

Consumer Sentiment

Consumer confidence in the economy remains stubbornly low, even falling a bit since our last report. 

The University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers reported that its preliminary monthly Index of Consumer Sentiment for April was 63.5. That’s down slightly from our last report – despite a slight easing recently in consumer prices — and 15.5 points lower than it was when Biden took office in January 2021.

“While consumers have noted the easing of inflation among durable goods and cars, they still expect high inflation to persist, at least in the short run,” Joanne Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers, said. “On net, consumers did not perceive material changes in the economic environment in April.”

Stock Markets

Under the past two presidents, the stock markets rose sharply. But that hasn’t been the case under Biden.

Since Biden took office, the S&P 500 stock index is up about 6.8% as of the close of the market on April 26.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is made up of 30 large corporations, hasn’t done much better, increasing 7.7%.

And the tech-heavy NASDAQ composite index, made up of more than 3,000 companies, is down 10.2% since Biden took office, despite a surprisingly strong first quarter. Year to date, NASDAQ is up 13.3%.

Health Insurance

The latest figures from the National Health Interview Survey show that 8.7% of the population was uninsured in the third quarter of 2022 at the time they were interviewed. That compares with 10.3% of the population that was uninsured in the fourth quarter of 2020, before Biden took office.

That decrease of 1.6 percentage points is similar to the decrease we noted in our last report comparing all of 2020 to the first six months of 2022. Over that time frame, the number of people without health insurance declined by 4.2 million.

The NHIS is a program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the data collection is performed by the Census Bureau in face-to-face interviews.

It’s possible the number, and percentage, of uninsured Americans will start to go up, now that some Medicaid provisions enacted during the coronavirus pandemic are being phased out.

As the Kaiser Family Foundation explains, in March 2020, a pandemic relief law increased the federal Medicaid funding sent to states and required states to keep Medicaid recipients continuously enrolled while the COVID-19 public health emergency was in effect. The Medicaid program is known for “churn,” meaning people lose coverage and reenroll often. This could be due to fluctuations in income that change eligibility or inability to comply with renewal requirements and checks on eligibility.

This continuous enrollment provision was one reason Medicaid enrollment has grown over the last few years, reaching nearly 95 million at the end of March. But this requirement ended on March 31, due to another law Congress passed late last year, and the enhanced federal funding during the pandemic will slowly phase out through the end of this year. KFF estimates that between 5.3 million and 14.2 million people will be disenrolled during this time. The Department of Health and Human Services says the number could be as high as 15 million, 6.8 million of whom would still be eligible for Medicaid.

Some who lose Medicaid coverage could be eligible for subsidized plans on the Affordable Care Act exchanges or other insurance, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services required states to come up with plans on how they might mitigate loss of insurance during this so-called “unwinding” period. But KFF says the change in policy could lead to an increase in the number of people who lack health insurance.

Immigration

The number of apprehensions of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southwest border remains historically high, but since our last report in January, the situation has changed markedly. In part due to seasonal trends and policies implemented by the Biden administration, the number of apprehensions significantly declined in January and February — to numbers not seen since shortly after Biden took office.

On March 24, Biden boasted that “the number of migrants arriving on our southern border has dropped precipitously.”

The number of apprehensions rose in March, but still remained well below the number from March 2022. However, an immigration expert cautioned the U.S. may be seeing the “calm before the storm” should the Biden administration end Title 42, a public health law the Trump administration invoked early in the pandemic that allows border officials to immediately return many of those caught trying to enter the country illegally.

Looking at the entirety of Biden’s time in office, and to even out the seasonal changes in border crossings, we compare the most recent 12 months on record with the year prior to him taking office. And for the past 12 months ending in March, the latest figures available, apprehensions totaled 2,246,798, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s 342% higher than during Trump’s last year in office.

Apprehensions by the U.S. Border Patrol hit 221,710 in December, the second highest monthly total on record. But in January, that number dropped nearly 42% to 128,936. And it remained about the same in February, at 130,024. (Those figures were 13% and 18% lower than the same months in 2022.) The number rose in March to 162,317, though that’s 23% below the level in March 2022.

According to Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, part of the drop was likely due to seasonal factors. January tends to be a slow month for illegal immigration, because of the holiday season across Latin America.

But Biden administration policies also played a role, he said. In early January, Biden unveiled several border enforcement initiatives that included expanding the “parole” process for Venezuelans to Nicaraguans, Haitians and Cubans, allowing applicants a two-year work permit if they have a sponsor in the U.S. and they pass a background check.

At the same time, the administration expanded Title 42 to include Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti, meaning people from those countries caught illegally crossing into the U.S. could be immediately expelled.

Those changes contributed to the declining number of apprehensions at the border to a more manageable level in January and February, Ruiz Soto said. But that may change dramatically if the Biden administration follows through with its plan to end Title 42 on May 11, when the policy is set to expire, he said.

“That could incentivize increased migration in April,” Ruiz Soto said, and could lead to a “significant surge” in May. If so, he said, the decline in apprehensions in January and February could prove to have been just a temporary lull.

In anticipation of the end of Title 42, the Biden administration has been increasing expedited removals under Title 8, which stipulates that someone caught trying to cross illegally is barred from legal entry for five years. Those caught attempting to cross illegally multiple times can be charged criminally.

In addition, the administration is also pursuing a rule that would mean those attempting to cross into the U.S. illegally would have a “presumption of asylum ineligibility” in the U.S. if they have failed to seek asylum in another country on their travels to the U.S.

Even with the lower numbers in January and February, the number of apprehensions remains historically very high under Biden. Part of that is due to the same people making multiple attempts to cross the border, what is known as the recidivism rate. Title 42 carries no consequences for Mexicans immediately turned around at the border, Ruiz Soto said, and so many of them try again repeatedly.

In addition, he said, there are some “push factors” encouraging migration by Mexicans. One factor is an increase in drug and cartel activity in Mexico, Ruiz Soto said. In addition, he said, “Mexico has really struggled to recover from the pandemic.”

Food Stamps

The number of people in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, increased again since our last update.

As of January, nearly 42.7 million people were receiving food assistance, the highest monthly enrollment since Biden has been in office. That figure is up 344,515 people from October, and it’s an increase of about 1.2%, or 504,274 people, from January 2021, when Biden became president. The figures come from Department of Agriculture data published this month.

Under Biden, SNAP enrollment was as low as 40.8 million in August and September 2021. Trump’s lowest month was February 2020, when the program had 36.9 million participants.

Trade Deficit

The international trade deficit has gone up under Biden.

Figures published this month by the Bureau of Economic Analysis show the U.S. imported about $909.8 billion more in goods and services than it exported over the last 12 months through February. That’s an increase of nearly $256 billion, or roughly 39%, compared with 2020.

Through the first two months of 2023, however, the trade gap in goods and services decreased $35.5 billion, or 20.3%, from the same period in 2022, the BEA said. The $945.3 billion trade deficit in 2022 was the largest on record going back to 1960.

Crude Oil Production and Imports

U.S. crude oil production averaged roughly 11.97 million barrels per day during Biden’s most recent 12 months in office (through January), according to Energy Information Administration data released in March. That was 5.7% higher than the average daily amount of crude oil produced in 2020.

Crude oil production averaged 11.88 million barrels per day throughout 2022, the EIA said. That’s the highest annual average since 2019. According to its Short-Term Energy Outlook published in April, the EIA expects crude oil production to increase to a record 12.54 million barrels per day in 2023.

Meanwhile, imports of crude oil averaged 6.27 million barrels per day in Biden’s last 12 months. That’s up nearly 6.7% from average daily imports in 2020.

The EIA projects crude oil imports will exceed exports by 2.85 million barrels per day in 2023 — which is a 6.7% increase in net imports from 2020 to 2022.

Carbon Emissions

Last year, there were about 4.96 billion metric tons of emissions from the consumption of coal, natural gas and various petroleum products, according to the EIA. That total is 1.2% more than in 2021 and 8.4% above 2020.

The EIA currently forecasts that the U.S. will have 4.79 billion metric tons of energy-related emissions in 2023. That would be a decline of 3.4% from 2022 and almost 7% below the 5.15 billion metric tons emitted pre-pandemic in 2019.

Debt and Deficits

Debt — Since our last quarterly update, the public debt, which excludes money the government owes itself, has changed only slightly. It increased $9.1 billion to over $24.6 trillion, as of April 24, bringing the total increase under Biden to $2.97 trillion. That’s 13.7% higher than it was when Biden took office — unchanged from our last report.

Deficits — So far, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the budget deficit for fiscal year 2023 is ahead of where it was at this point in fiscal 2022, when the Treasury Department said the deficit for the full fiscal cycle approached $1.38 trillion.

Through the first six months of the current fiscal year (October to March), the deficit was $1.1 trillion, or “$430 billion more than the shortfall recorded during the same period last year,” the CBO said in its most recent Monthly Budget Review.

In February, the CBO projected that the FY 2023 deficit would increase slightly to $1.41 trillion. That’s $426 billion more than it projected in May 2022, CBO said.

Gun Sales

Gun purchases appeared to decline again during the first quarter of 2023, according to numbers from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun industry trade group.

The NSSF estimates gun sales by tracking the number of background checks for firearm sales based on the FBI’s National Instant Background Check System, or NICS. The NSSF-adjusted figures exclude background checks unrelated to sales, such as those required for concealed-carry permits. We rely on these figures because the federal government doesn’t collect data on gun sales.

The NSSF-adjusted NICS total for background checks during the first three months of 2023 was about 4.17 million, the group reported. That’s down more than 1% from 4.21 million in the first quarter of 2022 and almost 24% lower than the first quarter of 2021.

The first quarter figure for 2023 is about 26% lower than the almost 5.63 million during Trump’s last quarter in 2020, which was a record year for background checks for firearm sales.

Crime

The number of murders in 70 large U.S. cities went up by 1.6% from 2020 to 2022, according to the latest reports from the Major Cities Chiefs Association.

The small increase reflects a decline in murders last year (down 5.1%) after two straight years of increases — a 33.4% jump from 2019 to 2020, before Biden took office (based on statistics from 67 large cities) and a much smaller 6.2% increase from 2020 to 2021, Biden’s first year in office (based on 70 large cities).

Despite last year’s decrease, the number of murders — 9,138 in 2022 — is not back down to the pre-pandemic 2019 level, which totaled 6,406, though the latter figure is based on three fewer law enforcement agencies.

AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group, has found murders are continuing to go down in 2023. Its work, based on publicly available information from 73 large law enforcement agencies nationwide, shows a 10.2% decline in murders as of April 26, compared with the same period last year — with more than half of the agencies’ figures updated as of this month. 

From 2020 to 2022, the Major Cities Chiefs Association also found a 7.5% increase in the number of rapes, a 1.8% rise in robberies and a 14.1% increase in aggravated assaults.

We won’t have nationwide crime figures from the FBI for 2022 until this fall. As we’ve reported in our last two Biden’s Numbers updates, the FBI estimated that “violent and property crime remained consistent between 2020 and 2021.”

There have been several mass murders in the country in the last few years, including the May 2022 killings of 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and 10 people in a racially motivated attack at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and more recently, the killing of three children and three adults at a school in Nashville in March. In response to these mass shootings, Biden has repeatedly called for a ban on semi-automatic weapons and large capacity magazines.

The Gun Violence Archive determined there were 36 mass murders in 2022, compared with 28 in 2021, 21 in 2020 and 31 in 2019. The group defines “mass murder” as a single incident in which at least four people were killed, not including the shooter.

Another gun violence database created by Mother Jones provides a count of “mass shootings,” defined as three or more victims in a shooting in a public place. Unlike in the Gun Violence Archives database, incidents in private homes or stemming from gang activity or robberies are not included. Mother Jones found 12 mass shootings in 2022, six in 2021, two in 2020 and 10 in 2019.

The FBI maintains statistics on what it calls “active shooter” incidents, in which “one or more individuals” is “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” There were 50 active shooter incidents in 2022, 61 in 2021, 40 in 2020 and 28 in 2019.

Judiciary Appointments

Supreme Court — Biden’s Supreme Court nominees still stand at one: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was confirmed on April 7, 2022, and replaced retired Justice Stephen G. Breyer, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. Trump had won confirmation for two — Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — at the same point during his term.

Court of Appeals — Under Biden, 31 U.S. Court of Appeals judges have been confirmed. At the same point under Trump, 37 had been confirmed.

District Court — Biden has racked up 87 District Court confirmations, while Trump had 58 nominees confirmed at the same time during his presidency.

Two U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges also have been confirmed under Biden.

As of April 19, there were 78 federal court vacancies, with 36 nominees pending.

Home Prices & Homeownership

Home prices — The Fed’s attempts to slow inflation by repeatedly raising interest rates put the brakes on home prices last year. But the median price of existing, single-family homes has started to climb again.

The median price of an existing, single-family home sold in March was $380,000, according to the National Association of Realtors. That’s down from a year ago ($385,400), but it’s also the second consecutive month that home prices had gone up after a seven-month slide, NAR data show.

“While prices have dropped from where they were at their peak this time last year, they are still above 2021 prices in many markets,” Lindsay McLean, the CEO of HomeLister told gobankingrates.com. “Mortgage rates have stabilized a bit and offer activity seems to be resuming, as buyers are slowly coming back to the table.”

The Fed began raising interest rates on March 16, 2022, increasing rates last month for the ninth time in 12 months.

The median price of an existing, single-family home reached a high of $420,900 in June, according to the NAR. But, as mortgage rates continued to climb, prices tumbled for seven consecutive months, dropping to $365,400 in January.

Despite the swing in prices, the March median price was 23.4% higher than it had been in January 2021, when Biden took office. Annual home prices have been rising since 2012, in large part because of a high demand and relatively low inventory, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

Homeownership — Homeownership rates have remained virtually unchanged under Biden.

The homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of “occupied housing units that are owner-occupied,” was 65.9% in the fourth quarter of 2022 — similar to the 65.8% rate during Trump’s last quarter in office. (Usual word of caution: The bureau warns against making comparisons with the fourth quarter of 2020, because of pandemic-related restrictions on in-person data collection.) 

The rate peaked under Trump in the second quarter of 2020 at 67.9%. The highest homeownership rate on record was 69.2% in 2004, when George W. Bush was president.

Refugees

Biden remains far from fulfilling his ambitious campaign goal of accepting up to 125,000 refugees a year.

As president, Biden set the cap on refugee admissions for fiscal year 2023 at 125,000 – just as he did in fiscal year 2022. To achieve that goal, the administration would have to admit an average of 10,417 refugees per month.

However, in fiscal year 2022, the administration accepted only 25,465 refugees, or 2,122 per month, according to State Department data. In the first six months of fiscal year 2023, which began Oct. 1, the administration increased its monthly average, welcoming 18,429 refugees, or 3,072 per month. (See “Refugee Admissions Report” for monthly data from 2000 through 2023.)

Overall, the U.S. has admitted 53,904 refugees in Biden’s first full 26 months in office, or 2,073 refugees per month, the data show. That’s about 12% higher than the 1,845 monthly average during the four years under Trump, who significantly reduced the admission of refugees. (Technical point: For both presidents, our monthly averages include only full months in office, excluding the month of January 2017 and January 2021, when administrations overlapped.)

In its report to Congress for fiscal year 2023, the State Department said “we are beginning to make progress towards fulfilling President Biden’s ambitious admissions target.” It is true that the average monthly refugee admissions have increased under Biden. The 3,072 monthly average in the first six months of fiscal year 2023 is the highest it has been for the same six-month period since fiscal year 2017, which includes months under both Trump and his predecessor, President Barack Obama.

But if it maintains its current pace, the administration would accept 36,864 refugees in fiscal year 2023 — which is much higher than last fiscal year, but far short of Biden’s campaign goal of 125,000.

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Williams, Elizabeth et al. “Fiscal and Enrollment Implications of Medicaid Continuous Coverage Requirement During and After the PHE Ends.” Kaiser Family Foundation. 10 May 2022.

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The post Biden’s Numbers, April Update appeared first on FactCheck.org.

The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee plans to hold a “field hearing” in Manhattan on April 17 to draw attention to “how Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s pro-crime, anti-victim policies have led to an increase in violent crime and a dangerous community for New York City residents.”

Experts told us it was unlikely Bragg had or could have an impact on crime trends, and crime data for Manhattan don’t match the GOP narrative. 

And it’s no secret why Republicans have chosen to come to Manhattan.

On April 4, Bragg unsealed an indictment against Donald Trump accusing the former president of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to three people alleging extramarital affairs by Trump, and making a case that the payments were made to illegally help Trump’s presidential campaign.

Numerous Republicans, and Trump himself, have attacked Bragg’s case against Trump as politically motivated. But more than that, they argue that while Bragg expends office resources to pursue Trump, his supposedly soft-on-crime policies have led to soaring crime in Manhattan.

On April 13, Republican Rep. Andy Biggs introduced legislation calling for defunding of the Manhattan DA’s office “for failing to address lawlessness and for utilizing federal resources in the political prosecution of President Trump.”

But while overall crime in Manhattan increased in Bragg’s first year as DA in 2022 — as it did in most cities around the country — murders declined. And in the first few months of 2023, murders, robberies, rape and shooting incidents are all down from the same period last year (though felony assaults are up).

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said on Fox News that in the committee’s “field hearing” in Manhattan he plans to bring crime victims to talk about “the unbelievable level of crime we have seen in these jurisdictions, these urban areas around the country, where you have some left-wing prosecutor who thinks it’s more important to focus on politics than it is to keep bad guys off the streets and behind bars.”

Through an office spokesperson, Bragg has labeled the hearing a “political stunt” and claimed that New York City is “the safest big city in America.”

We should caution that there are numerous ways to slice crime statistics, including comparing 2021 with 2022, or, as Bragg’s office has done, looking at year-to-date statistics — Jan. 1 to April 9 – compared with the same period last year. The trends are a bit of a mixed bag.

And, we note, New York City is made up of five counties. Manhattan is New York County, and since Bragg serves only as the DA of Manhattan, it makes more sense, when possible, to focus on statistics just for Manhattan, as opposed to all of New York City. It’s also important to look at national crime trends, to provide context.

Citywide Statistics

Trump says that Bragg’s indictment, which he calls “Political Persecution,” comes at the expense of rising and rampant crime in Manhattan.

“Meanwhile, overall crime in New York was up 30% last year, much more than that the year before with felony assaults, robberies and burglaries all up by massive, massive numbers,” Trump said in a speech from Mar-a-Lago after his April 4 arraignment. “Not the same place that I know, not the same place that you know.”

Trump appears to have been citing citywide statistics for seven major felony offenses — murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny of a motor vehicle — which increased by about 23% from 2021 to 2022, according to New York City Police Department data. Notably, however, murder (which Trump did not mention) went down citywide in 2022 by 10%.

Murders in Manhattan, specifically, dropped 15% in 2022 to 78. For historical perspective, that’s the lowest number since 2019, and it is far lower than the number of murders in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For example, there were 503 murders in Manhattan in 1990 — more than six times as many as last year.

The crime increases in New York City in 2022 were roughly in line with national crime trends in big cities nationwide. According to a report from the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan criminal justice think tank, robberies, non-residential burglaries, larcenies and motor vehicle theft all increased between 2021 and 2022 in cities that were part of its review (including New York). The report also found that homicides dipped in big cities in 2022, as they did in New York City.

Bragg also was making a claim about the entire city when he said that the Judiciary Committee would be visiting “the safest big city in America.”

In a Fox News interview, James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, mocked that claim, saying, “I don’t think many people are going to come to his defense and say New York City is the safest city in America right now.”

But Patrick Sharkey, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University who created a website that tracks data on murder for large cities, said just that.

“NYC is among the safest big cities in the country,” Sharkey told us via email. “Among the 9 cities with 1 million+ for which I have data, only San Diego had a lower murder rate last year. Among the 29 cities with 500k+, only 4 cities had a lower murder rate (San Diego, Mesa, San Jose, Sacramento).”

Jeffrey Fagan, a professor at Columbia Law School who is an expert in policing, told us something similar.

“For over 20 years, NYC has been safer than any other city of comparable size,” Fagan told us. “Violent crime spiked during the pandemic in NYC as elsewhere, and now it’s coming down.”

In his Fox News interview, Comer accused Bragg of being a “soft-on-crime prosecutor” and said that “we have district attorneys and prosecutors who are focusing on things to enhance their political career, as opposed to trying to put real criminals behind the bars for shoplifting, for murder, for rape, for carjacking.”

But we found no evidence that Bragg had backed off prosecuting serious offenses. Shortly after taking office on Jan. 1, 2022, Bragg issued a memo that instructed his office not to prosecute some offenses, such as marijuana misdemeanors, prostitution and resisting arrest, and only to seek jail time for major crimes such as homicide, violent felonies with a deadly weapon, domestic violence, sex offenses, public corruption and major economic crimes “unless required by law.” He further directed that his staff should “reduce pretrial incarceration” and “reserve pretrial detention for very serious cases.”

A month later, Bragg officially revised and clarified “several policies that had been fiercely criticized as too lenient,” the New York Times reported. For example, the Times noted, Bragg clarified that commercial robberies committed with a gun should be prosecuted as felonies, that “the default” in gun possession cases should be felony charges and that any violence against a police officer should be prosecuted.

Crime experts we spoke to said it is unlikely that Bragg’s policies have had any significant effect on crime trends in Manhattan – let alone the entire city.

Cities across the country saw increases in gun violence in 2020 that persisted into 2021, Sharkey said, including cities with both Democratic and Republican mayors, and cities with and without progressive prosecutors.

“There is no evidence that cities with more progressive prosecutors have had an impact on violence,” Sharkey said.

“I reject the entire premise of this current ‘debate:’ that the policies of one district attorney in Manhattan could demonstrably impact the crime rates of a number of different types of offenses throughout the city over the past year or two,” Andrew Karmen, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, told us via email.

“The district attorney of a borough can only work with the ‘solved’ cases that the police hand over to him,” Karmen said. “Most reported cases (such as motor vehicle thefts, robberies, burglaries, even rapes) go unsolved. Even the clearance rate for murders is low (somewhere between 50% and 70%, depending on how it is measured). So, the D.A. cannot really influence the larger criminal activity problem throughout the borough or the entire city in any substantial way, since most offenders are still on the loose – the police have not figured out who they are and how to catch them.”

The rise in crime in 2021 also tracked national trends, Karmen said.

“Urban crime problems across the nation worsened in May and June of 2020 after the lockdown was lifted and George Floyd was murdered,” Karmen said, so “all blame can’t be attributed to D.A. Bragg’s reformist approach since there is a nationwide uptick.” (Karmen was referring to protests and riots after Floyd, a Black man, died after a white police officer kneeled on his neck during an arrest in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.)

Manhattan Crime

Congressional Republicans have made their case anecdotally, with some tweeting out news reports or videos showing instances of violent crime in Manhattan to bolster their argument that Bragg’s attention is wrongly focused on Trump as opposed to violent crime.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, tweeted a video of a man being shot in Manhattan and commented, “Yesterday, a man was shot in cold blood in DA Alvin Bragg’s NYC. People are murdered in Manhattan every day as a result of Bragg’s pro-crime policies. But what is Alvin focused on? The political persecution of President Trump, an innocent man who hasn’t committed a crime.”

Actually, there have been 20 people murdered in Manhattan so far this year. That comes to once every five days, on average, not every day. Citywide, the murder rate in New York in 2022 was 5.42 per 100,000 residents. For comparison, the rate in Atlanta, which abuts Greene’s legislative district, is 31.75. That means the murder rate in Atlanta was nearly six times higher than in New York City in 2022.

Some have pointed to rising crime overall in 2022 in Manhattan as evidence that Bragg’s policies are worsening crime there.

Looking at the seven major felonies tracked by the New York City Police Department, the number of crimes rose by nearly 26% in Manhattan compared with the year before. Nearly two-thirds of the increase was due to a 34% increase in grand larceny. But six out of seven of the major felony categories were up in 2022. The exception, as we said, was for murder, which saw a 15% drop, from 92 in 2021 to 78 in 2022.

The increases in 2022 in Manhattan — overall and for individual crime categories — were roughly in line with the other four boroughs of New York City, Fagan said. In other words, Manhattan was not an outlier that might suggest policy differences there. And, as we said, the statistics are in line with a national trend of increased crime in large cities around the country in 2022.

And, as Bragg’s office highlighted, crime in Manhattan generally declined in the first quarter of this year.

“Just-released NYPD data show shootings and homicides are down in New York City for the first quarter of this year, with progress in Manhattan helping to drive the overall citywide decrease,” according to a statement from a Bragg spokesperson. “Virtually every major crime category is lower in Manhattan now than it was last year (as of 4/2/23): murders are down 14%, shootings are down 17%, burglaries are down 21%, and robberies are down 8%.”

According to our analysis of the latest New York Police Department statistics, so far this year, murders (-9%), rapes (-29%), robberies (-10%), burglaries (-23%) and shooting incidents (-15%) are all trending down in Manhattan. (That’s comparing Jan. 1 to April 9 of this year with the same period last year.) However, felony assault (+6%) and grand larceny (+4%) are on the rise.

“Overall, this year (to date), Manhattan’s crime numbers look pretty good,” Christopher Herrmann, an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told us via email. “Total crime is down a little bit right now for Manhattan….down 2%, driven by big decreases in burglary and robbery (these are two of the high volume/personal crimes that drives fear of crime up/down).”

Herrmann warned that while politicians critical of Bragg may highlight anecdotal instances from crime victims in Manhattan “there are so many other cities struggling with much higher violent crime rates.”

“It will be easy to cherry-pick some victims to come and share their stories,” Herrmann said. “Unfortunately, you can’t share the same stories for anyone who was NOT a victim of crime.”

“To me, the numbers speak for themselves….NYC (all 5 boros/counties) went through difficult times during the pandemic, like many other cities throughout the country,” Herrmann said. “Crime is not a red/blue issue, there are plenty of high crime cities that are red/blue and plenty of low crime cities that are red/blue. NYC is much safer, per capita, then some of the larger Ohio cities, so I don’t understand Jordan’s reasoning for selecting out Bragg. … He [Jordan] is certainly not focused on actual crime/crime numbers.”

Fagan also said that several cities in Ohio, where Jordan is from, have higher rates of violent crime than New York which is generally “middle of the pack” among large and medium size cities.

“New York is not a dangerous place,” Fagan said.

Sean Christensen contributed to this article.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104. 

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Summary

Here’s how the United States has fared since President Joe Biden took office two years ago:

• The economy added 10.7 million jobs under Biden, putting the total 1.2 million higher than before the pandemic.

• The unemployment rate dropped back to 3.5%; unfilled job openings surged, with over 1.7 for every unemployed jobseeker.

• Inflation roared back to the highest level in over 40 years before slowing markedly in late 2022. Overall, consumer prices are up nearly 14%. Gasoline is up 39.1%.

• Wages rose briskly, by 9.5%. But after adjusting for inflation, “real” weekly earnings went down 4.1%.

• The number of people without health insurance went down by 4.2 million.

• The trade deficit for 2022 is still on pace to set a new record.

• Economic growth has bounced back after two consecutive quarters of negative growth, and corporate profits reached a new high.
  

• Crude oil production has increased over 4%, and crude oil imports are up 7.5%.

• Gun purchases, as measured by background checks for firearm sales, declined for the second consecutive year.

• The number of people receiving federal food assistance has increased slightly.

• The publicly held debt is up 13.7%, even as annual deficits have declined.

• Apprehensions of those trying to illegally cross the southwest border into the U.S. are up 351% for the past 12 months, compared with President Donald Trump’s last year in office.

• Stocks performed poorly. The S&P 500-stock index inched up 3.1%.

Analysis

This is our fifth edition of “Biden’s Numbers,” which we first posted in January 2022 and updated on April 14, July 21 and Oct. 14. It is designed to provide an accurate statistical measure of how the U.S. has fared under Biden. We’ll continue to publish new editions with fresh data on a quarterly basis.

As we said when we posted “Obama’s Numbers” and “Trump’s Numbers,” opinions will differ on how much credit or blame any president deserves for things that happen during his time in office. We make no judgment on that.

Jobs and Unemployment

The number of people with jobs has increased dramatically since Biden took office, far surpassing pre-pandemic levels.

Employment — The U.S. economy added 10,726,000 jobs between Biden’s inauguration and December, the latest month for which data are available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The December figure is 1,239,000 higher than the February 2020 peak of employment before COVID-19 forced massive shutdowns and layoffs.

One major category of jobs is still lagging, however. Government employment is still 438,000 jobs short of the pre-pandemic peak — including 248,000 public school teachers and other local education workers. 

Unemployment — The unemployment rate fell from 6.3% at the time Biden took office to 3.5% in December — a decline of 2.8 percentage points. The current rate is exactly where it was in the months just before the pandemic.

That’s uncommonly low. Since 1948, when BLS began keeping records, the jobless rate has been at or below 3.5% for only 59 months, or 6.6% of the time. Three of those months were in 2022 and three others were during the Trump years, just before the pandemic. Before that, the rate hadn’t been that low since the 1960s.

Job Openings — The number of unfilled job openings soared to a record of nearly 11.9 million during Biden’s first 14 months in office, but then declined after the Federal Reserve began a steep series of interest-rate increases aimed at cooling the economy to bring down price inflation.

The number had slipped down to just 10.5 million on the last business day of November, the most recent month on record. That’s still an increase of over 3.2 million openings — or nearly 45% — during Biden’s time.

In November, there was an average of over 1.7 jobs for every unemployed job seeker. When Biden took office, there were more job seekers than openings.

The number of job openings in December is set to be released Feb. 1.

Labor Force Participation — One reason many job openings go unfilled is that millions of Americans left the workforce during the pandemic and haven’t returned. The labor force participation rate (the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work) has inched up slightly during Biden’s time, from 61.3% in January 2021 to 62.3% in December.

That’s an increase of only 1 percentage point, and still leaves the rate well below the pre-pandemic level of 63.3% for February 2020.

The rate peaked at 67.3% more than two decades ago, during the first four months of 2000. Even before the pandemic economists predicted further declines due largely to the aging population. The most recent 10-year economic projection by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts the rate will rise only to 62.4% by the middle of this year — still well below the pre-pandemic level — then resume its long-term slide and drop to 61.4% by the end of 2032.

Manufacturing Jobs — During the presidential campaign, Biden promised he had a plan to create a million new manufacturing jobs — and whether it’s his doing or not, the number is rising briskly.

As of December, the U.S. added 750,000 manufacturing jobs during Biden’s time, a 6.2% increase in the space of 23 months, according to BLS. Furthermore, the December total is 149,000, or 1.2% above the number of manufacturing jobs in February 2020, before the pandemic forced plant closures and layoffs.

During Trump’s four years, the economy lost 182,000 manufacturing jobs, or 1.4%, largely due to the pandemic.

Wages and Inflation

CPI — Inflation came roaring back under Biden, but has slowed dramatically in the most recent six months.

Overall, during his first 23 months in office the Consumer Price Index rose 13.7%.

It was for a time the worst inflation in decades. The 12 months ending last June saw a 9.1% increase in the CPI (before seasonal adjustment), which the Bureau of Labor Statistics said was the biggest such increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

But the worst may now be over. The CPI rose 5.4% in the first half of last year, but only 0.9% in the last half. In December, the CPI actually declined slightly, by 0.1%. The BLS measure of gasoline prices plunged 27.5% in the last half of 2022 and went down 9.4% in December alone.

Gasoline Prices — The price of gasoline has gyrated wildly under Biden.

During the first 57 weeks of his administration, the national average price of regular gasoline at the pump rose by $1.15 (or 48.4%) as motorists resumed travel and the economy bounced back after pandemic lockdowns.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and the price shot up by another $1.48 per gallon in just 16 weeks as world oil markets were disrupted by the West’s efforts to punish Russia, the world’s third-largest oil producer (after the U.S. and Saudi Arabia). Gasoline prices peaked briefly at a record high of just over $5 per gallon in the week ending June 13.

Over the next six months the price drifted down to a low of $3.09 the week ending Dec. 26, and now has gone up again to $3.31 the week ending Jan. 16, the most recent on record.

So after all the ups and downs, the most recent price is 93 cents higher than in the week before Biden took office, an increase of 39.1%

Prices are expected to rise further this year. In its most recent Short-Term Energy Outlook, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicted that gasoline prices would average $3.32 a gallon in 2023.

Wages — Wages also have gone up under Biden, but not as fast as prices.

Average weekly earnings for rank-and-file workers went up 9.5% during Biden’s first 23 months in office, according to monthly figures compiled by the BLS. Those production and nonsupervisory workers make up 81% of all employees in the private sector.

But inflation ate up all that gain and more. What are called “real” weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation and measured in dollars valued at their average level in 1982-84, actually declined 4.1% during that time.

But recently real wages have been rising as inflation has moderated. During the last half of 2022, real weekly earnings rose 1.3%.

Economic Growth

The U.S. economy has improved since our last report.

The nation’s economy posted a surprisingly strong third quarter in 2022 after two straight quarters of contraction, and it appears that the growth continued in the fourth quarter before slowing again in 2023.

While concerns remain about a pending recession, some forecast it will be relatively mild or may not happen at all.

The real gross domestic product, which accounts for inflation, expanded at an annual rate of 3.2% in the third quarter of 2022 after contracting at an annual rate of 1.6% in the first quarter and 0.6% in the second quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The BEA’s first official estimate for the fourth quarter of 2022 won’t be released until Jan. 26. But the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s “GDP Now” estimated that, as of Jan. 20, the economy increased at an annual rate of 3.5% in the fourth quarter. 

For the year, the most recent median forecast of the Federal Reserve Board members and Federal Reserve Bank presidents issued on Dec. 14 projected 0.5% growth for all of 2022. The Summary of Economic Projections released by the Fed at its Dec. 14 meeting also showed the central bank expected a real GDP gain of 0.5% in 2023 and 1.6% in 2024.

A majority of U.S. CEOs surveyed by The Conference Board expect a recession in 2023, although they anticipate it will be relatively mild.

“Ninety-eight percent of CEOs in the U.S. think there is going to be a recession — but it’s going to be short and shallow,” Dana Peterson, the Conference Board’s chief economist, told the Wall Street Journal.

Some economists even say a downturn isn’t inevitable, as the Associated Press reported.

Corporate Profits

Under Biden, corporate profits have reached new heights, although the most recent quarter showed a leveling off. 

After-tax corporate profits set a record at $2.75 trillion in 2021. During the third quarter of 2022, corporate profits hit an annual rate of nearly $2.9 trillion — which was a slight dip from the $3 trillion record set in the previous quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

“Profits decreased less than 0.1 percent in the third quarter after increasing 4.6 percent in the second quarter,” the BEA said in a Dec. 22 release.

Even with a slight dip, the current quarterly rate is 37% higher than the full-year figure for 2020, the year before Biden took office, as estimated by the BEA. (See line 45.)

Consumer Sentiment

Under Biden, high inflation has weakened consumer confidence in the economy, although there has been a slight uptick since our last report. 

The University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers reported that its preliminary monthly Index of Consumer Sentiment for January was 64.6. That’s slightly better than our last report – when the index was 58.6 in September — and significantly higher than a record low of 50 in June. But it’s still 14.4 points lower than it was when Biden took office in January 2021. 

Joanne W. Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers, attributed the recent rise to “higher incomes and easing inflation.” 

“Consumer sentiment remained low from a historical perspective but continued lifting for the second consecutive month, rising 8% above December and reaching about 4% below a year ago,” Hsu said in a statement on the preliminary survey results for January. “Current assessments of personal finances surged 16% to its highest reading in eight months on the basis of higher incomes and easing inflation.”

Stock Markets

Stock market gains that were made in Biden’s first year were all but wiped out in 2022 — which was the worst year for Wall Street since 2008.

Under the past two presidents, the stock markets went steadily up. The S&P 500-stock index rose 166% over the eight years Obama was in office, and it climbed another 67.8% during Trump’s four years. 

But since Biden took office, the S&P 500 is up a bare 3.1% as of the close of the market on Jan. 20.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is made up of 30 large corporations, did somewhat better, eking out a 7.0% gain in the two years since he took office.

But the NASDAQ composite index, made up of more than 3,000 companies including many in the technology sector that performed particularly poorly in 2022, fell sharply — down 17.2% since Biden took office. 

Health Insurance

Early release figures from the National Health Interview Survey show a drop in the number and percentage of people who lacked health insurance during Biden’s time in office. The latest figures show that 27.4 million people, or 8.3% of the population, were uninsured at the time they were interviewed in the first six months of 2022, compared with 31.6 million people, or 9.7%, who were uninsured in 2020, the year before Biden was sworn in.

That’s a decrease of 4.2 million people, or 1.4 percentage points.

The NHIS is a program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the data collection is performed by the Census Bureau in face-to-face interviews.

From 2020 to 2021, the NHIS found a drop in the number of uninsured people of just 1.6 million, which it said was not a significant difference. But there was a more sizable decline in the first six months of 2022.

The percentage of Americans under age 65 who had insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act exchanges, such as HealthCare.gov, went up from 3.8% in 2020 to 4.3% in 2021, a figure that held steady for the first six months of 2022.

The Census Bureau’s annual report, which measures those who lacked insurance for the entire year, won’t be available until this fall.

Immigration

The number of apprehensions of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southwest border continues to hover near historic highs.

To even out the seasonal changes in border crossings, our measure compares the most recent 12 months on record with the year prior to a president taking office. And for the past 12 months ending in November, the latest figures available, apprehensions totaled 2,291,433, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s 351% higher than during Trump’s last year in office.

Since our last report in October, apprehensions rose, after a slight dip in the summer months. The number of apprehensions in September, October and November averaged just over 206,000 per month. That’s lower than the peak of 241,136 in May of last year, but looking at the entirety of Biden’s time in office, apprehensions have never been higher in history, dating back to at least 1925.

Facing heightened criticism from Republicans, Biden made his first trip to the U.S.-Mexico border as president on Jan. 8 with a four-hour visit to El Paso. Ahead of the trip, Biden spoke to reporters about border security and enforcement, acknowledging that it was “a complicated issue.”

After faulting congressional Republicans for failing to support “a comprehensive immigration plan to fix the system completely” (although, as we wrote, the sweeping immigration plan Biden proposed on his first day in office was also opposed by some Democrats and never came up for a vote), Biden announced several executive actions he was taking “to stiffen enforcement for those who try to come without a legal right to stay, and to put in place a faster process — I emphasize a ‘faster process’ — to decide a claim of asylum.”

Among the initiatives in Biden’s plan is expanding the “parole” process for Venezuelans to Nicaraguans, Haitians and Cubans, allowing applicants a two-year work permit if they have a friend or relative in the U.S. sponsor them and they pass a background check. The plan also includes adding more asylum officers and immigration judges to process asylum claims more quickly.

Biden has sought to terminate Title 42, a public health law invoked in response to the pandemic in March 2020 that allowed border officials to immediately return many of those caught trying to enter the country illegally. The Supreme Court in December extended the policy for at least two more months until the court hears arguments on the case in February.

Once Title 42 ends, Biden said, migrants will have to use an app and book an appointment to schedule an interview on their asylum claims, but they will have to wait outside the country until then. Those who do not go through proper channels will be expelled and will be subject to a five-year ban on reentry.

Trade Deficit

The U.S. imported almost $965.2 billion more in goods and services than it exported over the last 12 months through November, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis figures published this month. The international trade deficit in that period was $311.2 billion higher, or about 47.6% more, than in 2020.

As of November, the goods and services deficit had increased $120.1 billion from the same 11-month period in 2021 — putting the U.S. on pace to exceed the record trade deficit from the previous year.

Oil Production and Imports

U.S. crude oil production averaged roughly 11.79 million barrels per day during Biden’s most recent 12 months in office (ending in October), according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data published in late December. That was over 4% higher than the average daily amount of crude oil produced in 2020.

In its Short-Term Energy Outlook for January, the EIA projected that crude oil production averaged 11.86 million barrels per day in 2022, which would be the highest average since 2019. The EIA expects crude oil production to increase to 12.41 millions barrels per day in 2023, which would be a new record.

As for crude oil imports in Biden’s last 12 months, the U.S. brought in about 6.32 million barrels per day on average. That’s up more than 7.5% from average daily imports in 2020.

Carbon Emissions

There was no change in U.S. carbon emissions since our last quarterly update.

In the most recent 12 months on record (ending in September), there still were almost 4.95 billion metric tons of emissions from the consumption of coal, natural gas and various petroleum products, according to the EIA. That’s over 8% more than the 4.58 billion metric tons that were emitted in 2020 — but lower than about 5.15 billion metric tons emitted in 2019.

The EIA forecasts that the U.S. will have 4.83 billion metric tons of energy-related emissions in 2023, which would be a decline of over 3% from the projected total of 4.99 billion metric tons emitted in 2022.

Gun Sales

After spiking at the start of the pandemic, gun purchases appear to have slowed for the second consecutive year, based on figures from the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

Since the federal government doesn’t collect data on gun sales, the NSSF, a gun industry trade group, estimates gun sales by tracking the number of background checks for firearm sales based on the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS. The NSSF-adjusted figures exclude background checks unrelated to sales, such as those required for concealed-carry permits.

Earlier this month, NSSF reported that the adjusted NICS total for background checks in 2022 was about 16.43 million. That’s the third highest annual total going back to 2000 — but it’s 11.3% lower than in 2021 and 22.1% below 2020, the current one-year record, with almost 21.1 million such background checks.

In 2019, before the pandemic, there were nearly 13.2 million.

“Though not a direct correlation to firearms sales, the NSSF-adjusted NICS data provide an additional picture of current market conditions,” the NSSF said in a statement about the numbers.

Crime

The Major Cities Chiefs Association found the number of murders in 70 large U.S. cities went down by 4.3% in the first nine months of 2022, compared with the same time period in 2021. Murders declined from 7,184 to 6,877.

The drop follows an increase in homicides of 6.2% from 2020, the year before Biden became president, to 2021, according to the same group, and a 33.4% increase from 2019 to 2020, with the latter figure from 67 law enforcement agencies.

The Major Cities Chiefs Association’s most recent report also shows a 3.4% decline in the number of rapes, an 11% increase in robberies and a 1.3% increase in aggravated assaults for the first nine months of last year.

FBI data on nationwide crime for 2022 won’t be released until the fall. As we reported in our last Biden’s Numbers update, the FBI estimated that “violent and property crime remained consistent between 2020 and 2021.” Specifically, the FBI determined violent crimes fell by 1%, while murders increased by 4.3%, but the agency said the figures “are not considered statistically significant.”

The estimates also were based on data from fewer local law enforcement agencies than usual, since the FBI had transitioned to a new system — yet some police departments, including those in New York City and Los Angeles, hadn’t done so.

Another independent analysis by AH Datalytics, an organization run by criminal justice data analysts, shows a 4.8% decline in murders from late 2021 to late 2022, as of Jan. 20. The group compiles publicly available information from more than 90 large law enforcement agencies nationwide, with most agencies reporting figures through the end of November or December.

Debts and Deficits

Debt — In the three months since our last update, the public debt, which excludes money the government owes itself, increased by over $313 billion to $24.6 trillion, as of Jan. 19. The public debt is now 13.7% higher than it was when Biden took office.

Deficits — So far, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the budget deficit for fiscal year 2023 is ahead of where it was at this point in fiscal 2022, when the Treasury Department said the deficit for the full fiscal cycle was $1.375 trillion.

Through the first three months of the current fiscal year (October to December), the deficit was $418 billion, or “$41 billion more than the shortfall recorded during the same period last year,” the CBO said in its most recent Monthly Budget Review. The nonpartisan budget agency expects in February to release its Budget and Economic Outlook, with deficit projections for the full fiscal year.

Food Stamps

The number of people in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, has gone up each month since our last update.

As of October, more than 42.3 million people were receiving food assistance. That’s over 1.4 million more people than in June, and it’s an increase of 0.4%, or over 166,000 people, from January 2021, when Biden became president. The figures come from the Department of Agriculture’s latest data.

Under Biden, SNAP enrollment was as low as 40.8 million in August and September 2021. Trump’s lowest month was February 2020, when the program had 36.9 million participants.

Home Prices & Homeownership

Home Prices — With the Federal Reserve continuing to raise rates, the once red-hot housing market has cooled off. 

The median price of an existing, single-family home sold in November was $376,700 — down from the August preliminary price ($396,300) that we used in our last report, according to the National Association of Realtors. (The final August number was even higher at $398,800.)

The median home price fell for the fifth consecutive month in November after reaching a record high of $420,900 in June, and existing home sales have declined for the 10th month in a row, NAR said.

The decline in home sales and prices comes as the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate seven times last year in an effort to slow inflation. As a result, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.33% as of Jan. 12 – up from 3.45% a year ago, according to mortgage buyer Freddie Mac. 

Even so, the November median price was 22.3% higher than it had been in January 2021, when Biden took office. Home prices have been rising for about a decade, in large part because of a high demand and relatively low inventory, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

Homeownership — Homeownership rates have remained virtually unchanged under Biden.

The homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of occupied housing units that are owner-occupied, was 66% in the third quarter of 2022 — just a shade over the 65.8% rate during Trump’s last quarter in office. (Usual word of caution: The bureau warns against making comparisons with the fourth quarter of 2020, because of pandemic-related restrictions on in-person data collection.) 

The rate peaked under Trump in the second quarter of 2020 at 67.9%. The highest homeownership rate on record was 69.2% in 2004, when George W. Bush was president.

Refugees

Biden has made only incremental progress toward fulfilling his ambitious campaign promise to accept up to 125,000 refugees into the United States each year.

On Sept. 27, the Biden administration set the cap on refugee admissions for fiscal year 2023 at 125,000 – just as it did in fiscal year 2022. To achieve the president’s goal, the administration would have to admit an average of 10,417 refugees per month.

However, in fiscal year 2022, the administration accepted only 25,465 refugees, or 2,122 per month, according to State Department data. In the first three months of fiscal year 2023, which began Oct. 1, the administration welcomed 6,750 refugees, or 2,250 per month. (See “Refugee Admissions Report” for monthly data from 2000 through 2023.)

Overall, the U.S. has admitted 42,223 refugees in Biden’s first full 23 months in office, or 1,836 refugees per month, the data show. That’s 0.5% less than the 1,845 monthly average during the four years under Trump, who significantly reduced the admission of refugees. (For both presidents, our monthly averages include only full months in office, excluding the month of January 2017 and January 2021, when administrations overlapped.)

In its report to Congress for fiscal year 2023, the State Department said “we are beginning to make progress towards fulfilling President Biden’s ambitious admissions target.” In our last report, we noted that the U.S. ended fiscal year 2022 by admitting more than 5,500 refugees in September — the highest monthly amount since January 2017.

But the Biden administration, so far, has been unable to sustain that level of admission in the new fiscal year.

Judiciary Appointments

Supreme Court — Biden has won confirmation for one Supreme Court nominee, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Trump had won confirmation for two by this point in his tenure: Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Justice Jackson replaced retired Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who was appointed by then-President Bill Clinton and served nearly three decades. 

Court of Appeals — So far, 28 U.S. Court of Appeals judges have been confirmed under Biden. At the same point in Trump’s presidency — halfway through his four years in office — 30 had been confirmed.

District Court — Biden has won confirmation for 68 District Court judges. At the same point in Trump’s term, 53 nominees had been confirmed.

Two U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges also have been confirmed under Biden.

There were 87 federal court vacancies, with 23 nominees pending, as of Jan. 20.

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The post Biden’s Numbers, January 2023 Update appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Voters are about to get a respite from the political attack-ad onslaught: Election Day is tomorrow. That means no more messages from Democrats attacking Republicans over abortion rights or the future of Medicare; no more Republicans blaming Democrats for inflation or crime. At least for a little while.

Before the 2022 midterms are all over, we summarize these and other themes we’ve seen this election cycle and explain how the top talking points have distorted the facts.

Abortion Rights

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court cast aside 49 years of precedent when it overturned Roe v. Wade, declaring the “Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.” As a result, jurisdiction over abortion returned to the states — some of which have begun to enact abortion bans and restrictions.

The Democrats have sought to capitalize on the abortion issue. From Labor Day through Nov. 5, the Democrats have run more than 600 ads that mention abortion in Senate, House and gubernatorial campaigns, according to Kantar Media, an ad-tracking service.

But sometimes the Democrats and their allies have gone too far in their statements and ads, as we found they did in Nevada and Pennsylvania.

An ad from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee falsely claimed that Nevada Republican House candidate April Becker supports a nationwide abortion ban and “taking away a woman’s right to abortion with no exceptions.” Becker has said she opposes a national ban. And, while she opposes abortion, Becker said she supports exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of the mother.

Also in Nevada, a TV ad from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee showed a woman being handcuffed and arrested, while the ad narrator said that Senate Republican candidate Adam Laxalt, if elected, “would let states …. criminalize” abortion. But the DSCC couldn’t provide any examples of Laxalt supporting criminalizing abortion for the mother, and the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, said there are no state laws or pending state legislation that would criminalize abortion for the mother.

Similarly, the liberal FF PAC claimed in a TV ad that Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is running for the Senate in Pennsylvania, will “let politicians take away the right to choose, with no exceptions,” even though Oz has consistently said he supports exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of the mother. Oz describes himself as “100% pro-life,” but he has not been endorsed by the National Right to Life.

Both Senate ads were carefully worded. DSCC said Laxalt “would let states … criminalize abortion,” and FF PAC said Oz would “let politicians take away the right to choose, with no exceptions.” And it’s true both men have said that states should decide the issue. But viewers may be left with the mistaken impression that Oz does not support any abortion exceptions or that Laxalt says he wants to lock up women who have an abortion. (See all of our articles on abortion here.)

Inflation and Gasoline Prices

The Consumer Price Index rose 13.2% in Joe Biden’s first 20 months as president — giving Republicans a potent issue in the midterm elections. Since Labor Day, the Republicans have run more than 500 TV ads that mentioned inflation, according to Kantar, which tracks political advertising.

In June, for example, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson and the National Republican Senatorial Committee aired a TV ad that misleadingly claimed “Joe Biden’s inflation tax” cost Wisconsin families $5,000 a year. That figure was lifted from a report by Bloomberg Economics, which in late March estimated the impact of inflation on U.S. households. But the estimate did not tease out how much of that increase could be attributed to Biden’s policies or take into consideration how rising wages have helped offset higher costs.

More recently, the Senate Leadership Fund launched a TV ad this month that claims “Joe Biden’s reckless spending” is “crushing Ohio with inflation and higher prices on everything from groceries to gas,” citing stimulus spending in the American Rescue Plan Act that became law in March 2021 with no Republican votes.

As we’ve written, the American Rescue Plan did contribute to inflation, but it wasn’t the sole or even primary reason for rising costs. Economists cite several reasons for high inflation, particularly the economic disruptions created by the COVID-19 pandemic and later the Russian war in Ukraine. Also, the San Francisco Federal Reserve and other experts said spending in the ARP may have helped prevent “outright deflation and slower economic growth.”

When it comes to gasoline prices, we’ve long written that U.S. presidents have limited influence over the price that consumers pay at the pump. But that has not stopped Republicans from claiming that Biden and congressional Democrats are responsible for the increase in prices. 

In June, when average prices hit $5 a gallon, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, in an ad attacking Democrat John Fetterman in the Pennsylvania Senate race, suggested that the high cost of gasoline was because “Biden started choking oil production his very first day.” That wasn’t the case. U.S. crude oil production this year is up compared with 2020, when gasoline prices were much lower.

Other GOP ads also have attempted to blame Democrats for the price of gas.

But the price of crude oil, which is set on the global market based on international supply and demand, is the biggest factor in the cost of gasoline. Average gasoline prices dropped early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when crude oil prices were low because economic shutdowns worldwide reduced demand. Gasoline prices began to rise as the global economy recovered and demand for oil, which is refined into gasoline, began to exceed the available supply. 

Prices spiked again when Russia, one of the world’s top producers and exporters of crude oil, invaded Ukraine in February, further disrupting international oil supplies, as many nations restricted imports from Russia in retaliation.

When crude oil prices declined earlier this year, which many analysts attributed to concerns that another global recession would again reduce demand for oil and refined products, U.S. gasoline prices started to come down as well. While Biden at times has tried to take credit for the drop in prices, experts have said that his decision to authorize the release of millions of barrels of crude oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve did not help significantly. 

As of Oct. 31, the average weekly price of regular grade gasoline in the U.S. was about $3.74 per gallon, according to the Energy Information Administration. That price is about $1.26 lower than the high of almost $5.01 in mid-June, but still about $1.36 more than the average price of $2.38 the week of Jan. 18, 2021, just days before Biden took office.

Medicare and Social Security

In what is an election-year tradition, Democrats have claimed that Republicans want to cut, slash or even “end” Medicare and Social Security — and some Republicans have pushed back with similar charges.

Most of the ads we’ve seen on this topic have come from Democrats. Many of them attempt to tie the GOP candidates to a proposal by Republican Sen. Rick Scott to bring all federal legislation up for a vote every five years — which would include Medicare, Social Security and a lot of other government programs.

Scott’s idea, which is part of a “Plan to Rescue America,” outlining his vision for what Republicans should do if they retake control of Congress, certainly raised eyebrows. He said he wants all federal legislation to “sunset” in five years, and “[i]f a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” Such action could certainly lead to changes to Medicare and Social Security, and create major legislative battles over how the programs should operate every five years. But Scott, who is chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and who released the plan in February, has said he wants to “fix” and “preserve,” not end, the programs. More importantly, many Republicans haven’t embraced his proposal.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on March 1 that he would be the majority leader if Republicans control the Senate, and: “We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half of the American people and sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years. That will not be part of a Republican Senate majority agenda.” (See below for more on that point on taxes.)

That hasn’t stopped Democrats from trying to alarm seniors. In the spring, an ad from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said “Republicans’ plan” would “end Social Security” and “end Medicare.”

More recently, ads from two Democratic-aligned super PACs claimed Senate candidate Oz would support a plan to “take away” or “end” Medicare and Social Security. But Oz never endorsed the provision in Scott’s plan to “sunset” legislation.

We’ve seen other ads that have made some version of this claim, either citing Scott’s plan, other comments by the Republican candidate or both — or not citing anything at all. The DSCC has continued to tell voters that Republicans “will END Social Security and Medicare.”

Biden repeatedly has mentioned Scott’s plan, often describing it accurately. But in a speech on Nov. 1, he went on to say, “You’ve been paying into Social Security your whole life. You earned it. Now these guys want to take it away.” Biden was also referring to comments by Wisconsin Sen. Johnson that funding for the two programs should be discretionary, not mandatory, and approved by Congress every year. But neither Scott nor Johnson said they wanted to end Social Security.

Republicans, including Scott, have pushed back on these claims by misleadingly claiming Democrats had voted to cut or “slash” Medicare spending, pointing to the Inflation Reduction Act. That legislation aims to reduce spending by lowering prescription drug costs, including for Medicare beneficiaries. The provisions wouldn’t cut benefits, as the claims suggest. The National Republican Senatorial Committee made such a claim in an ad attacking Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia.

Crime

The Republicans set the tone early when in June 2021 — less than six months into Biden’s presidency — the House Republican Conference tweeted an image of rising homicide rates in seven cities with the words: “Welcome to President Biden’s America.”

But, as we wrote at the time, all seven cities saw large increases in 2020, compared with 2019, when Donald Trump was president, and six of the seven saw larger percentage increases in 2020 than they had in the first few months of Biden’s time in office.

By the end of 2021, the Major Cities Chiefs Association reported that homicides went up by 6.2% from 2020 to 2021 in 70 cities — down from the 33.4% increase it found in 67 cities from 2019 to 2020 under Trump.

Yet, Republicans have made crime a major issue in midterm races, portraying many Democratic candidates as soft on crime and anti-police.

In Pennsylvania’s Senate race, Oz has accused Fetterman of wanting to “eliminate life sentences for murderers.” In fact, Fetterman, the state’s lieutenant governor, has said he wants to give judges discretion in sentencing people convicted of second-degree murder, or felony murder, which is when someone is killed during the commission of a felony crime. People who are accomplices to those crimes can also be charged with second-degree murder. Currently, Pennsylvania is one of only eight states to impose mandatory life sentences without parole on those convicted of second-degree murder.

Johnson’s campaign in Wisconsin selectively edited the remarks of his Democratic challenger, Mandela Barnes, to misleadingly claim Barnes “rationalized violence” against Dallas police officers days after a gunman killed five officers in that city. Johnson’s ad ignored that Barnes said in the interview that the killings in Dallas were “not justified in any way.”

In New York’s 19th Congressional District, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, misleadingly claimed in a TV ad that Democrat Josh Riley said he “supports help not handcuffs” for criminals and is backed by “a radical group that wants to defund the police.” All this “as crime rages out of control.” But, as we wrote, Riley actually said that “folks having a mental health crisis deserve help not handcuffs,” and he has said he doesn’t support defunding the police. 

Also, as we explained in 2020, Congress has little to do with police funding. According to the Urban Institute, 86% of police funding in 2017 came from local governments.

Another part of the GOP’s “soft on crime” theme, Republicans have attacked a number of Democrats over economic stimulus checks going to some prisoners. The American Rescue Plan, for which all but one Democrat voted, did not block eligible inmates from receiving the law’s economic impact payments intended to help individuals and families during the pandemic.

But what the ads don’t tell viewers is that congressional Republicans also voted for two previous COVID-19 relief bills under Trump that permitted stimulus payments for some incarcerated people.

Taxes

In ads, politicians often specifically claim that their opponent supports higher taxes that fall on the so-called “middle class.” And that’s no accident: Whether it’s true or not, most people consider themselves to be middle class.

This midterm election cycle is no exception. We have seen ads from Democrats and Republicans alike making misleading claims about their opponents supporting tax hikes on this nebulous middle class.

The Republican spin:

Republicans have seized on Democrats’ vote for the Inflation Reduction Act to claim that Democrats voted to raise taxes on “lower- and middle-income families.” The attack is two-pronged.

The law does not include any new individual income taxes, but it does impose a corporate minimum tax of 15% on companies that report average profits in excess of $1 billion over a three-year period. That minimum tax is expected to raise about $315 billion over 10 years.

Tax experts say corporations pass along some of the burden of higher taxes in the form of lower wages and lower stock values, affecting shareholders. According to a Joint Committee on Taxation analysis of the legislation, federal taxes for people making less than $200,000 would rise by $16.6 billion in 2023, and those taxpayers would be shouldering just over 42% of the tax increases in the bill that year. And so, Republicans argue, that amounts to a tax increase on the middle class, and proof that President Joe Biden broke his promise not to raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 a year. But as we have noted, Biden always followed up that promise with a vow to make corporations “pay their fair share.”

Republicans have also pointed to another part of the Inflation Reduction Act that would fund increased Internal Revenue Service tax enforcement to falsely claim in TV ads that Democrats voted to raise taxes by $20 billion on “lower- and middle-income families.” For instance, Senate Leadership Fund ads cite that figure in attacks against Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, who is running for Senate against author JD Vance. But the claim relies on an outdated Congressional Budget Office estimate.

The Inflation Reduction Act provides the IRS with $79.6 billion over 10 years to improve technology, customer service and enforcement efforts to collect unpaid taxes. The CBO provided a preliminary estimate that the enhanced enforcement would result in people earning less than $400,000 paying about $20 billion more in taxes over the next 10 years. But that was before the Treasury Department issued specific guidance that enhanced enforcement should not increase the amount of audits on households making less than $400,000. Based on that direction, the CBO revised its estimate and concluded that those earning less than $400,000 will only pay “a small fraction” of the increased tax revenues that are expected as a result of enhanced IRS enforcement.

Republicans also have repeatedly claimed that the new law will allow the IRS to hire “87,000 new agents” to investigate average citizens. For example, an ad attacking Florida gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist claimed the Democrats “teamed up” with Biden to “hire 87,000 new IRS agents to audit the middle class.”

IRS and Treasury Department officials have said some of the increased IRS funding will go to hire new employees, potentially as many as 87,000, most of whom will replace outgoing staff and will be on the customer service side of the IRS, doing tasks such as upgrading computer systems and answering phones. Furthermore, however many new “agents” or tax enforcers are hired, which would be a minority of the positions, administration officials say those employees will focus on auditing the tax filings of high-income individuals and businesses — not “middle-class” workers.

The Democrats’ spin:

Democratic claims about Republican tax-raising have largely been based on Scott’s proposal. In addition to sunsetting federal legislation, the plan included a provision that stated: “All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount. Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax.” Democrats targeted political opponents who said even vaguely complimentary things about Scott’s plan, even if they never expressed support for that particular part of the plan, and accused them of supporting tax hikes on the “middle class.”

For example, the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC said in an ad that Oz would “hike taxes on working families” after Oz simply said Scott “has a vision for what the party can do going forward.” Not mentioned was that Oz went on to say, “we may not all agree on the specifics of the vision,” and that Oz never praised or even mentioned the minimum tax. Also, Oz has pledged that he would not raise taxes.

Similarly, an ad attacking Johnson in Wisconsin said he “supports a plan that would raise taxes on the middle class.” That is based on Johnson saying that he agreed with “most of” Scott’s plan and that he called it a “positive thing.”

As we explained, McConnell rejected the idea of raising taxes on half of Americans. Two months after he released his plan, Scott clarified in an op-ed for the Daily Caller that a minimum tax would not fall on retirees nor on any workers who “are already paying into the system, whether through income tax, payroll tax, state and local taxes.” That would seem to exclude almost all workers.

And in June, Scott revised his “Rescue America Plan,” adding a 12th point, but taking out the part that said, “All Americans should pay some income tax.” The attack ads mentioned above came months after Scott revised his plan.

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The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, is running ads on TV and social media that distort Democratic House candidate Josh Riley’s positions on crime.

One ad misleadingly claims that the New York Democrat said he “supports help not handcuffs” for criminals. Another ad from the super PAC accurately says that Riley is supported by the Working Families Party, but misleadingly implies he shares that group’s position on defunding the police. 

Riley, an attorney and former Democratic congressional staffer, is running against Duchess County Executive Marcus Molinaro, a Republican who lost the governor’s race in 2018. The pair are competing for the seat representing New York’s 19th Congressional District, which was recently redrawn due to redistricting. The seat is currently held by Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan, who is now seeking the seat for the redrawn 18th Congressional District.

Contrary to the CLF ads, Riley has said he doesn’t support defunding the police, and the “help not handcuffs” quote was edited from Riley’s statement during a candidate forum, where he actually said that “folks having a mental health crisis deserve help not handcuffs.”

He was quoting a phrase used by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which promotes “help not handcuffs” in instances when the police are called on someone experiencing a mental health crisis. 

The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC dedicated to “winning a Republican Majority” in the House, paid for at least four ads focused on Riley.

“For criminals, Josh Riley supports help not handcuffs,” says the narrator in the ad titled, “Vote Against Josh Riley: Not On Our Side.” The ad’s description on YouTube repeats the claim. CLF began running the ad on TV on Sept. 30, according to Kantar Media, a media company that tracks political ads. CLF is currently running three versions of a Facebook ad that says “When it comes to CRIME, Josh Riley supports HELP over HANDCUFFS.” 

CLF also posted the ad on Facebook with the caption, “As crime runs rampant throughout #NY19, Josh Riley continues to put criminals before New Yorkers. New York does not need another criminal coddling politician like Josh Riley.”

In small print, the ad cites a forum hosted by the Tompkins County Democratic Committee in June as proof for the claim that Riley said he supports “help not handcuffs” for criminals during the forum. After the citation, the ad says in parentheses, “quoting National Alliance on Mental Illness.”  

When we asked about the ad’s claim that “for criminals, Josh Riley supports help not handcuffs,” Calvin Moore, CLF communications director, told us in an email: “Josh Riley is literally on video saying he wants ‘help not handcuffs,’ and that clip is played in the ad, so you have the video proof right there.” 

But as we said, the ad edits Riley’s quote. In Riley’s full comment during the forum, he said he supports a concept advocated by the National Alliance on Mental Illness that “folks having a mental health crisis deserve help not handcuffs.” His comment followed a statement from Osun Zotique, who was one of Riley’s opponents in the primary.

Riley, Jun. 21: Osun was right when they said that the mental health issue and the intersection between the mental health system and the criminal justice system is a huge challenge that we need to address. So, when I was working as counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee, I was hearing both from law enforcement officials and also advocates in the community that because our mental health system is so badly underfunded, a lot of folks in crisis end up not getting the care that they need, not getting the services they need, and then their first encounter with anybody is with law enforcement because of a 911 call. That’s really bad for folks in crisis. You know the National Alliance on Mental Illness says folks in crisis deserve help not handcuffs and I believe that is really, really true. But the system as we have designed it doesn’t operate that way, so when people in the mental health crisis are interacting with the criminal justice system, it’s bad for folks in crisis, it’s bad for law enforcement officials who have to make do those responses, and it’s really bad for the taxpayer because one of the least efficient things you can do is take somebody who’s having a crisis and lock them up when what they really need is help.

Riley’s campaign spokesperson told us in an Oct. 20 email that the ad takes Riley’s comments “out of context and presents them to voters in a shamefully deceitful manner.” 

“Josh has never said any such thing. Rather, Josh has a clear position supporting law enforcement and community safety, and he has a proven record to back it up,”  the spokesperson said. “Josh repeatedly and explicitly said that people in mental health crisis – not criminals – deserve help, not handcuffs, and he was quoting the National Alliance on Mental Illness when he did so.”

“In fact, just seconds before Josh said that people in mental health crisis deserve help, not handcuffs, Josh said the following about law enforcement: ‘Our folks in law enforcement put their lives on the line everyday to serve and protect our community and we owe them a huge debt of gratitude for that,’” the spokesperson added.

Support for Law Enforcement Funding 

The CLF ad titled, “Vote Against Josh Riley: Whose Side Is He On? Not Ours,” says Riley is supported by “a radical group that wants to defund the police,” referring to the Working Families Party. The ad, which also repeats the “help not handcuffs” claim, began airing on TV on Oct. 11, according to Kantar Media.

Moore said the ad’s claim that Riley “is supported by a radical group that wants to defund the police” is “100% correct and indisputably true.”

It’s true that Riley will appear on the ballot under both the Democratic Party and the Working Families Party — a minor political party that endorsed Riley and has expressed support for defunding the police. But Riley has said he doesn’t support defunding the police. 

In a radio interview on Oct. 7 with Ithaca’s Morning News, Riley said he supports law enforcement and has “never ever” suggested defunding police.

In the same interview, Riley said he worked on legislation that provided more funding and support for the police during his stint as general counsel to then-Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota when Franken was on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Riley also said in the radio interview that he comes from a law enforcement family and his mother was a probation officer for nearly two decades, adding, “I’m not going to defund my mom.”

On his website, Riley says he would support, “Justice Department programs that support law enforcement, including the Byrne JAG [Justice Assistance Grant] program and COPS [Community Oriented Policing Services] program; collective bargaining rights for law enforcement and first responders; proposals to end the Government Pension Offset (GPO) and Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP), which reduce law enforcement’s retirement benefits; and amending Section 7(k) of the Fair Labor Standards Act to ensure that law enforcement and first responders are eligible for the overtime pay they deserve.”

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In the Wisconsin Senate race, an ad from Republican Sen. Ron Johnson selectively pulls comments made by his opponent, Democrat Mandela Barnes, from an interview days after a deadly attack on police in Dallas. The ad claims Barnes “rationalized violence” against police, but it ignores that Barnes said the killings were “not justified in any way” and that he “denounced” the attack.

The ad starts with TV news coverage of the July 7, 2016, sniper attack on Dallas police officers in which five officers were killed. A lone gunman, who was later killed in an explosion after a standoff with police, had opened fire during what had been a peaceful protest and march. The protest was in response to deadly police shootings that week of two Black men, in Louisiana and Minnesota.

A narrator in the ad then says of the Dallas attack: “Just days after this horrific crime, Mandela Barnes appeared on Vladimir Putin’s propaganda news outlet and rationalized violence against American police officers.”

That’s followed by a clip of Barnes saying: “Police officers are over-exercising their badges,” and, “This probably was a retaliatory attack.”

Barnes, now the lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, was interviewed on RT, the Russian state-owned TV network, on July 9, 2016, when he was a state representative. And he said those words, but not in succession, and the first comment didn’t pertain to the attack in Dallas. It’s the words the ad leaves out that show Barnes condemned the violence against Dallas police and violence in general.

The RT interview began with the news anchor asking Barnes about recent “fatalities as a result of police violence.” Barnes responded, talking about these “two very tragic incidents,” referring to the fatal police shootings in Louisiana, in which Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old Black man was killed during an encounter with Baton Rouge police officers on July 5, 2016, and in Minnesota, in which Philando Castile, a 32-year-old Black man was killed by a St. Anthony police officer during a traffic stop on July 6, 2016.

“And again, what the problem is these police, these police districts, these police officers across the country, they haven’t reformed their patterns and practices,” Barnes continued. “And that’s the, that’s the scary part about it. Because when they see that nothing is going to happen, when anybody can get away with something, you’re going to do it. And that’s what’s happening all the time. These police officers are over-exercising their badges. … And it’s a very unfortunate set of circumstances.”

Barnes then immediately added: “Unfortunately, Dallas is a completely separate situation than this, than these two.”

So when Barnes said “police officers are over-exercising their badges” — the quote featured in the ad — he wasn’t talking about the attack in Dallas.

The next question from the RT anchor was: “Some people are seeing this shooting in Dallas as, as a kickback to police brutality. What’s your take on that?”

Barnes began by denouncing the attack. “So what I’ll say, you know, like I’ve said before, is people are very upset, and there’s no way that the Dallas police officers, that killing is not justified in any way. I have repeatedly denounced that. I don’t condone violence in any way. I get so mad about police killings because … I don’t want anybody to die. But we want everybody to be able to live peacefully, live in a safe environment. So that’s, that’s the first thing.

“And this probably was a retaliatory attack where somebody just said, ‘You know what, I’m tired of this happening in our country. I’m tired of this happening, and I’m tired of waking up and this being the news. I’m tired of this being the new norm.’ And you had a frustrated individual, somebody who took matters into his own hands. And I don’t justify it, it should not have happened. That’s not the way that you solve the crisis, because it only makes these police officers even more tense, which creates more scary situations for people.”

That’s the context for Barnes’ remark, also featured in the ad, that “this probably was a retaliatory attack.” But left out of the TV spot is the fact that Barnes said the Dallas attack was “not justified in any way” and that “it should not have happened.”

The day after the ambush on Dallas police, the city’s police chief, David Brown, said the shooter had said his motive was retaliatory. “He said he was upset about the recent police shootings,” Brown said. “The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”

In the RT interview, Barnes reiterated his thoughts on the attack: “So while it may have been a retaliatory act by one person, again, that is a lone wolf situation. Does not [in] any way represent the feelings of the majority of Americans. Like we don’t want more people killed. We want less people killed. That’s the reason we get upset. That’s the reason we protest. That’s reason we, you know, we we have all this outrage, is for less violence.”

He addressed the deadly attack a few more times in the interview, saying, “We can’t take our, you know, attention off of the two incidents that happened before Dallas. Not to say that we should forget about Dallas, because we absolutely shouldn’t. That’s not a situation that should have ever happened.”

At the end of the interview, Barnes spoke again about the killings of Sterling and Castile. “I look at myself, I look at my friends, this could have been any one of us in that situation, and it should never have been that way and to see how slow justice, you know, happens in those instances when it involves police officers. People get very upset, and that’s why you see what happened in Dallas and again, not to justify it because it shouldn’t have happened. But people have been pushed to a breaking point.”

When we asked the Barnes campaign about the ad, spokesperson Maddy McDaniel said that Barnes “has repeatedly condemned violence, including the shooting that claimed the lives of the officers in Dallas.”

The Johnson campaign defended the ad. “He provided multiple reasons why he can understand why this sort of thing would happen — by definition rationalizing means to create a reason, explanation, or excuse for something. He’s doing exactly that,” spokesperson Alec Zimmerman told us.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel unearthed Barnes’ 2016 RT interview and five others he gave to the Kremlin-backed network that year and the year prior. The newspaper reported in the Oct. 13 story that RT had been part of a Russian influence effort to, in the words of the New York Times in 2020, “push divisive racial narratives, including stories emphasizing allegations of police abuse in the United States.”

The Barnes campaign confirmed to us that he was not paid to appear on RT.

Readers can form their own opinions about Barnes’ interview. But in order to do so, they should have the context of Barnes’ quotes, including his condemnations of the killings of Dallas police officers. The Johnson campaign ad omits that information.

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A sheriff featured in an ad defending U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman accurately states that Fetterman “voted with law enforcement experts nearly 90% of the time” on the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons, and voted to give “a second chance” to nonviolent offenders. But it’s what the ad doesn’t say that may mislead viewers.

Reviewing just commutation cases for inmates serving life sentences, we found that Fetterman and the board’s corrections expert voted the same 69% of the time. There were 26 times when Fetterman voted to commute life sentences — mostly for first- or second-degree murder — and the law enforcement expert voted not to.

The sheriff also says, “John gave a second chance to those who deserved it. Nonviolent offenders, marijuana users.” As Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, Fetterman has worked with the governor to expedite pardon applications for those with nonviolent marijuana convictions. But the ad may leave the mistaken impression that Fetterman only extended leniency to nonviolent offenders and marijuana users, when Fetterman has voted to extend pardons and commutations to people convicted of violent crimes, including first-degree murder.

Fetterman’s Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, and groups that support him have pounded the airwaves with ads and social media posts — some of them misleading — that seek to paint Fetterman as soft on crime. The ads have focused on Fetterman’s role as the chairman of the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons, which makes recommendations to the governor about pardons and clemency applications from inmates serving life sentences.

Fetterman has been an unabashed advocate for giving some prisoners a second chance.

“One of the things that I believe in most strongly is the power of a second chance, and as the chair of the Board of Pardons in Pennsylvania, delivering that has been one of the things that I’m most proud of,” Fetterman says in a video on his campaign website.

With Fetterman as chair, the board has recommended 50 commutations of life sentences, and Gov. Tom Wolf granted 47 of them, according to statistics published by the Board of Pardons. In the four years prior to Fetterman becoming lieutenant governor, the board recommended the commutation of just six life sentences.

“Since 2019, they’ve recommended more citizens for commutation than in the past 25 years combined,” Fetterman’s campaign website boasts of board members.

Fetterman last spring told supporters he ran for lieutenant governor in 2018 specifically to lead the Board of Pardons, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“You have an opportunity to really make a big impact on second chances,” Fetterman said. “That, to me, means everything. You have an opportunity to decide what direction we take in our society. Should you pay for the rest of your life for a mistake that you made if you were addicted or you were young, or you were in poverty?”

Ads from Oz and his supporters have highlighted cases in which Fetterman has advocated the release of murderers, including six times when he was the sole vote on the five-member board. A unanimous vote is needed for the case to move to the governor, who makes the ultimate call on commutations. And as we said, some of these attacks have gone too far.

Fetterman’s Response

“I’m sick of Oz talking about John Fetterman and crime,” Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Sheriff Sean Kilkenny, a Democrat, says in the ad released by the Fetterman campaign this week. “Here’s the truth: John gave a second chance to those who deserved it. Nonviolent offenders, marijuana users. He voted with law enforcement experts nearly 90% of the time. He reunited families and protected our freedom. And he saved taxpayer money.”

It’s true that Fetterman and Wolf have tried to make it easier for those convicted of nonviolent marijuana offenses to get pardons. In 2019, Fetterman worked to streamline applications for pardons from people convicted of low-level marijuana offenses.

“Anyone with a marijuana-related, nonviolent possession or paraphernalia charge is encouraged to apply for a pardon, for free, and have his or her application expedited,” Fetterman said at the time. “Given the favorable sentiment to legalizing marijuana, there’s no reason records of this nature should continue to hinder people from living their most productive lives.”

And on Sept. 1, Wolf and Fetterman announced “a coordinated effort for a one-time, large-scale pardoning project for people with select minor, non-violent marijuana criminal convictions,” saying that “thousands” of Pennsylvanians with convictions for possession of marijuana would be eligible, according to a press release from Wolf.

“Fetterman said the project will deliver second chances to thousands of deserving Pennsylvanians who are trying to improve their lives amidst the legislature’s refusal to ‘take the commonsense approach and just legalize it,’” the press release said.

“Nobody should be turned down for a job, housing, or volunteering at your child’s school because of some old nonviolent weed charge, especially given that most of us don’t even think this should be illegal,” Fetterman said.

So there is no question Fetterman has fought for “a second chance” for “nonviolent offenders, marijuana users,” as Kilkenny said in the Fetterman ad. But those aren’t the only offenders for whom Fetterman has sought leniency.

In fact, Fetterman has voted for “a second chance” for inmates who committed violent crimes, including murder, years or decades ago. We wrote about one of them, Wayne Covington, whose conviction for shooting and killing an 18-year-old man during a robbery in 1969 was featured in a Republican super PAC ad attacking Fetterman.

Covington pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. We noted that Covington, now 73, was 19 years old when he killed the man. He has spent more than 50 years in prison, and he is in poor health. In 1991, the state Corrections Commissioner deemed Covington a “minimal” public safety risk if he were released. Fetterman was the lone vote on the Board of Pardons to commute Covington’s sentence, and so he was not released.

Fetterman was also the lone vote to commute the sentence of John D. Brookins, who was sentenced to life in prison for murder for the 1990 killing of a Bucks County woman who prosecutors say was strangled and stabbed with a pair of scissors. Fetterman argued at the Board of Pardons hearing that investigators ought to test the weapon for DNA evidence. Brookins maintains that would prove his innocence, though the Bucks County district attorney disagrees.

“I don’t know if John Brookins is innocent or not,” Fetterman tweeted on March 3, 2021. “I’m not claiming he is. I want to know what the DNA says. If this was your son, father, brother or husband wouldn’t you? A flawless prison record over 30 years and the DA refuses to test the murder weapon for DNA. Why?”

The Fetterman ad, through Kilkenny, makes the case that these were anomalies, that on the Board of Pardons, Fetterman has “voted with law enforcement experts nearly 90% of the time.”

The Board of Pardons has five members, including the lieutenant governor (who chairs the board), the state attorney general (in this case Josh Shapiro, who is currently running for governor), and three members appointed by the governor, subject to the advice and consent of the state Senate, who are to include “a crime victim; a corrections expert; and a doctor of medicine, psychiatrist, or psychologist,” according to the Board of Pardons website. Harris Gubernick, the former director of the Bucks County Department of Corrections, currently fills the role as the “corrections expert” on the board. Gubernick was appointed to the board by former Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, in 2011. He was reappointed in 2018 with a unanimous vote by the Republican-controlled Senate.

The Fetterman campaign says Kilkenny was referring to votes in sync with Gubernick when he said, Fetterman has “voted with law enforcement experts nearly 90% of the time.”

The Fetterman campaign provided us data obtained from the Board of Pardons via a Freedom of Information Act request that show vote records related to board decisions to recommend or deny pardons and commutations between March 13, 2019, and Aug. 3, 2022. In all, the data show that Fetterman and Gubernick were both present and voted on 1,776 clemency applications. Nearly 87% of the time, the data show, Fetterman and Gubernick voted the same way to either recommend or deny the application. That’s the source of the 90% figure cited in the ad.

One caveat: The vast majority of the votes used for that calculation, 88%, were pardon votes. Any person convicted of a crime, nonviolent or not, can seek a pardon. According to the Board of Pardons, “A pardon relieves an individual of the consequences, generally in the nature of legal disabilities, resulting from conviction for a crime. … A pardon constitutes total forgiveness by the state, makes the crime as if it never happened and allows a job applicant to deny he was ever convicted of the crime without worry of any sanction.”

Many of the attacks on Fetterman from the Oz camp, however, have focused on Fetterman’s votes to commute life sentences. In Pennsylvania, there is no parole for those serving life sentences, and commutations are the only avenue for release. Those granted commutations are generally placed on parole upon their release.

(As we have explained in a previous article, Fetterman has said he wants to eliminate mandatory life sentences for people convicted of second-degree murder. Pennsylvania is one of just eight states that have a mandatory life sentence without parole for second-degree murder convictions. According to Pennsylvania law, second-degree murder applies when someone dies related to a felony, and can include people who were accomplices to those crimes.)

Breaking out just the cases where inmates serving life sentences were seeking a commutation, Gubernick and Fetterman voted together on 85 of them. In those cases, Fetterman and Gubernick were in agreement to recommend or deny the application about 69% of the time (42 times they both voted to recommend, and 17 times they both voted to deny). On 26 occasions, Fetterman voted to commute a life sentence when Gubernick voted against it. In six of those cases — many of them highlighted by Oz and his supporters on social media — Fetterman was the lone vote on the board recommending release of the inmate.

The Fetterman campaign told us in an email that the ad is “not meant to suggest Fetterman only extended second chances to nonviolent offenders and marijuana users,” only that these were two examples of people who deserved second chances. The campaign said that in addition, “John also gave second chances to others ‘who deserve it’ such as the wrongfully convicted, and deserving long-time inmates but in a 30 second ad we don’t have time to specify every class of person he helped get second chances.”

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A TV ad from a gun control advocacy group claims Republican Sen. Ron Johnson voted “against funding for the police, preventing local departments from hiring more officers.” But the two votes cited were against trillion-dollar spending bills that included a host of measures, well beyond law enforcement funding.

The ad leaves the misleading impression that Johnson simply opposed providing money for local police departments, but these pieces of legislation were much more complicated than that, giving lawmakers many reasons they may have supported or opposed them.

Everytown for Gun Safety Victory Fund, a super PAC, launched the TV spot on Sept. 23 as part of a $1 million media buy in Wisconsin for the midterms.

Johnson and Republican groups have repeatedly attacked his Democratic opponent, state Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, over the issue of police funding and crime. We’ve written about those misleading claims already.

Now, Everytown is turning the tables, claiming that Johnson “abandoned law enforcement, voting against funding for the police, preventing local departments from hiring more officers.”

It’s worth noting that this battle over who supports police more (or less) would be more apt in state or local government campaigns. In 2019, 87% of police funding came from local governments, according to the Urban Institute. “Nearly all state and local spending on police, corrections, and courts was funded by state and local governments because federal grants account for a very small share of these expenditures,” the think tank’s report said, noting that the figures didn’t include spending on federal policing, such as for federal prisons.

The TV ad cites two votes by Johnson: against the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in 2021 and against the $1.3 trillion consolidated appropriations bill to fund the government in 2018.

We’ll start with the ARP.

American Rescue Plan

The American Rescue Plan is a COVID-19 relief law that passed without any Republican support. It was signed into law by President Joe Biden in March 2021.

The ARP included $1,400 checks to most Americans; expanded unemployment benefits; and money for schools, small businesses and states. More than $350 billion was dedicated to state, county, city and tribal governments to use largely as they wished to aid in the economic recovery from the pandemic and public health measures.

Biden encouraged states and localities to use the money to support essential workers, including police. But there was no requirement in the legislation to spend money on law enforcement.

On March 6, 2021, after the Senate narrowly passed the bill, Biden said that state and local governments would now “have the resources they need available to them” to rehire “laid-off police officers, firefighters, teachers and nurses.” National police organizations also said they had worked to make sure the law included that aid to states and localities.

The administration has boasted that some of the funding was indeed used to hire police and support law enforcement. A May 13 White House fact sheet touted the millions of dollars in Houston dedicated to police overtime, and mental health and domestic violence efforts, among other initiatives; millions spent in Kansas City, including on hiring 150 police officers; and several other examples of cities using ARP money to invest in police equipment, recruitment and community safety programs. It also said Wisconsin had dedicated $100 million in anti-violence efforts across the state.

So the law did provide funding for police. But the nearly $2 trillion legislation provided funding for a lot more than that, and many Republicans said they opposed it because of the total cost, questioning the need for the spending after other COVID-19 relief legislation was enacted in 2020.

We previously wrote about the misleading claim that congressional Republicans “defunded the police” in voting against the ARP. In that story, we noted that White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki didn’t identify a single Republican who opposed the bill because of funding for police, when she was pressed on the matter in a June 2021 press briefing.

Johnson, on the day of the Senate vote on the legislation, released a statement saying that he opposed it because it would increase the debt and was “unneeded” for COVID-19 relief.

“This is not Covid relief — it is a massive debt burden that further mortgages our children’s future. I support helping people truly affected by the pandemic, but we should have targeted the unspent $1 trillion from previous bills first,” Johnson said. “The economy is already in a strong recovery, and this bill could spark harmful inflation. It was unneeded and unwise.”

As we’ve written, economists have credited the ARP with boosting the economy. But many also have said in retrospect, the law was too big and did contribute to, but didn’t “spark,” higher inflation, which was largely due to pandemic-related factors and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

When we asked Everytown about the ad, a spokesperson highlighted a question anchor Chris Wallace posed to a Republican lawmaker on “Fox News Sunday” on June 27, 2021. Wallace was interviewing Rep. Jim Banks, who blamed an increase in crime on Democrats, saying they supported “defunding the police.” Wallace responded that he wanted to “push back on that a little bit,” citing the ARP and Biden’s comments that the bill included funding for police.

Wallace asked: “Congressman Banks, you voted against that package, against that $350 billion, just like every other Republican in the House and Senate, so can’t you make the argument that it’s you and the Republicans who are defunding the police?”

But as we wrote previously, about a presidential adviser’s comments on the same show, this wasn’t a vote to cut federal funding for police, as the “defund” phrasing might suggest.

Nor was it simply a vote on police funding.

Consolidated Appropriations Act

The second vote cited in the Everytown ad is Johnson’s vote against a $1.3 trillion consolidated, or omnibus, appropriations act that narrowly averted a government shutdown in late March 2018. Everytown notes that bill, signed into law by then-President Donald Trump, included $2.4 billion for state and local law enforcement programs. But, again, it included funding for many other government programs — in fact, it funded the government for the rest of the fiscal year, through Sept. 30.

The 65-32 vote in the Senate was also bipartisan, with eight Democrats and one Independent voting against it.

We asked Everytown if that meant Sens. Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, among a few other Democrats who opposed the bill, also voted “against funding for the police,” but we didn’t get a response.

Democrats had hoped to include a measure to protect so-called Dreamers, those who were brought to the United States illegally when they were children and qualified for deferred deportation proceedings and work authorizations through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The failure to get a DACA fix in the funding bill was one of the reasons Sanders said he voted against it.

“Unfortunately, there are two fundamental failings in this deal that prevented me from voting for it. First, this bill does not address the great moral issue of our time – the fact that 800,000 young Dreamers in the DACA program are in grave danger of losing their legal status and subject to deportation,” Sanders said in a March 23, 2018, statement. “Second, the $165 billion increase in defense spending over two years is much too large. I believe in a strong military, but at a time when the U.S. spends more on defense than the next 12 countries combined, this increase is much too much.”

We couldn’t find a statement from Johnson at the time on his vote, and his campaign did not respond to our questions about this TV ad. But the point is that the motivation to vote against a large appropriations bill could include any number of reasons.

And using the same logic as the support for the ad, it could be argued that Johnson voted for police funding, when he voted for 2019 government funding legislation, which appropriated $304 million for the Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, program, which provides grants to states and localities.

After the Barnes campaign also charged that Johnson had voted against police funding, mainly citing omnibus appropriations laws, Johnson told reporters that he has voted against spending overall because of the nearly $31 trillion of debt, a figure that includes $6.6 trillion in money the government owes to itself.

“I vote against mortgaging our children’s future. And when you vote against a 2,000-page omnibus spending bill that’s probably spending a trillion dollars, there’s going to be good things in there they’re going to spend money on. But somebody has to have the courage to say no, we have to stop this. We’re seeing at least the beginning of a major debt crisis,” Johnson said, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The paper noted that “most” of the votes the Barnes campaign pointed to “were omnibus legislation that contained many provisions beyond being related to the police.”

Also among the votes cited by Barnes was one to block consideration of a 2011 bill to provide states and local governments with funding to hire and retain teachers and first responders. The legislation included $4 billion for grants to hire and retain law enforcement officers, and proposed a surtax on those earning more than $1 million to pay for the entire $35 billion act.

Gun Control Votes

The Everytown ad goes on to say Johnson “supported flooding our streets with guns, and making it easier for violent criminals and domestic abusers to get them.” The cited votes were against gun-control measures.

It’s true that Johnson voted against expanding background checks and against prohibiting those convicted of abusing a dating partner from getting guns.

We’ll provide an explanation of the votes.

The ad points to Johnson’s vote against the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which became law on June 25. Fifteen Republicans voted with all Democrats in the Senate to pass it.

The law could keep some guns off the streets. It beefed up background checks for those under age 21, increased penalties for firearms trafficking, required more people who sell guns to register as federally licensed sellers (which means they would then have to run background checks before selling guns), and barred more people convicted of domestic abuse from getting a firearm — hence the ad’s reference to “domestic abusers.”

That provision closes what was called the “boyfriend loophole.” The legislation extends prohibiting gun ownership to those convicted of domestic violence crimes against a dating partner (as opposed to only a co-parent or former/current spouse, as was the case before). But the Safer Communities Act allows those convicted of a misdemeanor domestic violence offense to once again own firearms five years after the conviction.

The ad also cites two Johnson votes on amendments to the Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act of 2013. He voted against an amendment to expand gun background checks, and for an amendment to institute reciprocity for concealed firearms, meaning that someone permitted to carry a concealed weapon in one state could do so in other states.

There was no final vote on the bill.

Everytown has a point about Johnson’s strong support for gun rights. After all, he has been endorsed by the National Rifle Association and has an “A” rating from the group. But the ad misleads when it cites the senator’s opposition to trillion-dollar spending bills as evidence of “voting against funding for police.”

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