The CNN Fact-Checking Team will be working through Thursday night, verifying, quantifying and qualifying the statements from both the “happy hour debate” at 5 p.m. and the 10-candidate summit at 9 p.m.
The team, comprised of researchers, editors and reporters across CNN, will pick the juiciest statements, analyze them, consult issue experts and then rate them either True, Mostly True; True, but Misleading; False; or It’s Complicated.
Fact check: Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry said that Donald Trump supports a single-payer health care system.
Perry said: “I’ve had my issues with Donald Trump. I’ve talked about Donald Trump from the standpoint of being an individual who is using his celebrity rather than his conservatism. How can you run for the Republican nomination and be for single-payer healthcare? I ask that with all due respect.”
Trump wrote this in his 2000 book: “The Canadian plan also helps Canadians live longer and healthier than America. We need, as a nation, to reexamine the single-payer plan, as many individual states are doing.”
But Trump has since reversed his position, telling The New York Times in 2011: “We had a much different country when I proposed those two things.”
And most recently, on July 31, a spokesman said: “Mr. Trump does not believe socialized medicine is the solution to expanding coverage.”
We rate Perry’s claim False.
Fact check: Carly Fiorina said that Trump has flip-flopped on health care, abortion and immigration.
Fiorina: “I would also just say this. Since he has changed his mind on amnesty, on health care and on abortion, I would just ask, what are the principles by which he will govern?”
Trump, as noted above, did change his position on single-payer. As for abortion, he said, “I am very pro-choice” on “Meet the Press” in 1999, but in a recent interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he admitted that he changed his position.
And on immigration, Trump did flip: He was once sympathetic to a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, but now says the U.S. should deport them.
He told Bill O’Reilly in 2011 that the U.S. should determine which undocumented immigrants can stay on a “case-by-case” basis.
“You know, it’s hard to generalize, but you’re going to have to look at the individual people, see how they’ve done, see how productive they’ve been, see what their references are, and then make a decision,” he said.
Furthermore, in an interview on “Morning Joe” last month, he seemed open to a pathway to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants.
But on July 30, he told CNN’s Dana Bash that he would deport all undocumented immigrants but allow some of the “good ones” to return.
We rate Fiorina’s claims True.
Fact check: Perry oversaw the creation of 1.5 million jobs between 2007 and 2014.
Perry said Texas created 1.5 million jobs between 2007 and 2014, when he was governor.
“Not just having been the governor of the 12th largest economy of the world, which I might add we had 1.5 million jobs during that period of time, over that 2007 through 2014 period. A period when America was going through a deep depression, greater than the Great Depression.”
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Texas had 10,997,356 employed people in December 2007, and 12,570,050 employed people in December 2014. That’s an increase of 1,572,694 people.
But that data includes agricultural workers, and many economists prefer nonfarm payroll data, which shows that Texas had 10,529,900 nonfarm employees in December 2007 and 11,749,500 nonfarm employees in December 2014. That’s an increase of 1,219,600 people.
Because Texas did add 1.5 million jobs in seven years, but because that measure may not be the best gauge of employment, we rate Perry’s claim as Mostly True.
Read more from the fact-checking squads at Politifact and The Washington Post.