Washington
CNN
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Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz sat down with CNN host Dana Bash on Thursday for the first formal interview of their campaign.

Bash directed most of his questions at Harris. Here’s a fact-check of some of Harris’ answers, including a misleading statement and an exaggeration.

Bash noted that Harris said, when she was running in the 2019 Democratic presidential primary, that “there’s no question that I support a ban on fracking.” When Bash asked if she still wanted to ban fracking, Harris replied, “No, and I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020 — that I would not ban fracking. As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.”

When Bash again noted that Harris had said in 2019 that she supported a ban on fracking, and asked Harris if she had changed her mind during that campaign (which Harris ended in December 2019), Harris said, “In 2020, I made it very clear where I stand. We’re in 2024 and I haven’t changed that position, and I won’t.”

Facts first: This is misleading. Harris did not make her position on fracking clear during her only debate of 2020, the vice presidential debate of the general election against then-Vice President Mike Pence; Harris never explicitly stated a personal position on fracking during that debate. Instead, she said that Joe Biden, then the leader of the Democratic ticket, would not ban fracking if he were elected president.

Harris said in the 2020 vice presidential debate, “Joe Biden will not ban fracking”; “I repeat, and the American people know this, Joe Biden will not ban fracking.”

It made sense for Harris to discuss Biden’s plans at that point, since the president sets the administration’s policies. But contrary to what she claimed on Thursday, none of those comments in the 2020 debate made it clear that she personally had a different view on the topic than she had the year before.

Child benefit and poverty

Harris praised the impact of the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill that Biden signed in 2021, which included a temporary increase in the child tax credit. She pointed to “when we do what we did in our first year in office to extend the child tax credit, we reduce child poverty in America by more than 50 percent.”

Facts first: The word “over,” which Harris pronounced very softly, makes this claim a slight exaggeration; the American Rescue Plan’s temporary expansion of the child tax credit helped reduce child poverty by 46%, according to a key federal measure, between 2020 and 2021. Moreover, it is important to note that this steep improvement lasted only the one year that the temporary improvement was in effect. The child poverty rate then peaked in 2022, the most recent year for which public data is currently available.

The American Rescue Plan increased the size of the child tax credit to $3,600 – from $2,000 – for qualifying families. The law also enabled many more low-income parents to claim the credit and distributed half of the credit monthly.

These changes helped send child poverty (as measured by the Supplemental Poverty Measure) to a record low of 5.2% in 2021, a 46% drop from 2020, when the rate was 9.7%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But in 2022, child poverty rose to 12.4%, roughly on par with where it was before the pandemic in 2019. That was the biggest jump in child poverty since the Supplemental Poverty Measure began.

Harris is now advocating to restore the $3,600 tax credit and create a new $6,000 tax credit for newborns.

Harris praised the Biden-Harris administration’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, a landmark climate bill on which Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, and spoke of “what we’ve already done: created over 300,000 new clean energy jobs.”

Facts first: This needs context. While it’s clear that a significant number of new clean energy jobs have been created as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, the “300,000” figure includes jobs that companies have promised to create but haven’t yet. And other counts of new clean energy jobs have come up with smaller numbers.

The 300,000 estimate comes from a June count by communications group Climate Power. It was compiled by adding up the jobs companies promised when they publicly announced 585 clean energy projects after the Inflation Reduction Act was passed through May 2024, a total of 312,900 announced jobs. Not all of those jobs have been created yet. Climate Power’s topline number also doesn’t distinguish between construction jobs that build new factories and the long-term jobs in those factories — jobs that build batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles, among other things.

In addition, E2, another clean energy group that tracks investments and jobs related to the Inflation Reduction Act, counted more than 109,000 new clean energy jobs created or announced from August 2022 through May 2024 — significantly lower than Climate Power’s figure. A recent report from the U.S. Department of Energy found that 142,000 new clean energy jobs were created in 2023.

Different entities use different methodologies when analyzing data, so it’s difficult to pin down an exact figure. Regardless, there’s no doubt that there’s a huge amount of investment in clean energy, with a significant number of new jobs in electric vehicle construction and renewables like wind and solar being created by the Inflation Reduction Act. The Department of Energy’s 2024 report showed that clean energy jobs accounted for more than half of all new jobs in the energy sector, growing at a rate twice that of the overall U.S. economy.

The report also acknowledges that the sudden growth of the clean energy sector as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act makes it difficult to keep up with all the jobs created.