Six of the candidates vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination took the stage Tuesday night in Des Moines for their last debate before the Iowa caucuses kick off the primary season in less than three weeks.
Here is how the candidates’ remarks stacked up against the truth.
WHAT THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT
Former Vice President Joe Biden attempted to explain his vote to authorize the Iraq war.
What Mr. Biden Said:
“I said 13 years ago it was a mistake to give the president the authority to go to war”
Mr. Biden was one of 77 senators who voted to authorize the war in Iraq in October 2002 — and he called that vote a mistake in 2005. The New York Times reviewed how he made that decision nearly two decades ago and found that the episode reveals how he operates “as a Senate dealmaker at heart.”
On other military engagements, potential and actual, Mr. Biden has exercised more caution. During his bid for the presidency in 2008, for example, Mr. Biden warned that war with Iran “is not just a bad option. It would be a disaster.”
When he became vice president, Mr. Biden was a lonely voice in the White House who argued against increasing troop levels in Afghanistan in 2009 — a fight he ultimately lost. He then repeatedly pushed to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by 2014 and, though President Barack Obama shared that aim, the United States still had troops in Afghanistan when the two men left office.
What the facts are
Senator Bernie Sanders said he objected to the United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement because it does not address climate change.
What Mr. Sanders said:
“Every major environmental organization has said ‘no’ to this new trade agreement because it does not even have the phrase ‘climate change’ in it.”
This is true. Democrats fought for language calling for a commitment to the Paris Agreement on climate change, as well as binding climate change standards, but those provisions did not make it into the final measure that passed the House. That bill, which awaits a vote in the Senate, does not include any mention of climate change.
WHAT THE FACTS ARE
Mr. Sanders said that Mr. Biden’s previous support for NAFTA and normalizing trade relations with China damaged the American work force.
WHAT MR. SANDERS SAID:
“And the end result of those two, just P.T.N.R. with China, Joe, and Nafta, cost us some four million jobs, as part of the race to the bottom.”
This is mostly true. As we reported when this issue came up last September, while NAFTA often receives much of the blame from Democrats for the loss of American manufacturing jobs, it is P.N.T.R. — Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China — that economists tend to point to as the cause of more job losses.
A 2014 report from the Economic Policy Institute estimated that 851,000 jobs were lost because of the trade deficit with Canada and Mexico. The same group found that the trade deficit in goods with China cost 3.4 million jobs from 2001 to 2017.
Still, most economists say that it is difficult to pinpoint blame on specific trade relationships for jobs losses, as trade creates winners and losers across the work force and generally boosts economic growth.
Fact checks and explainers by Linda Qiu, Lisa Friedman and Alan Rappeport.