The second round of Democratic debates is underway in Detroit, with 10 candidates onstage for the second of two back-to-back nights. The other 10 candidates who qualified for the debates appeared on the same stage on Tuesday.
Our reporters are following all of the exchanges. They will be fact-checking the candidates and providing context and explanation for the policy debates.
What the facts are
Andrew Yang overstated Amazon’s effect on retail stores.
What Mr. Yang said:
“Amazon is closing 30 percent of America’s stores and malls.”
This is false. The number of retail establishments — stores — in the United States is growing, not shrinking. There are more than 1 million such establishments, according to the Labor Department. About 75,000 of them closed in 2017, which is the most recent full year in the department’s statistics. There is no evidence that Amazon, or e-commerce broadly, is responsible for all of those closures, but even so, they don’t come anywhere close to a 30 percent closure rate.
Fact checks by Jim Tankersley.