Truth, Vance and the GOP
Why the VP candidate hyped a non-existent Fed study.
Let’s get to this one.
JD Vance in the debate made a big deal of saying that his views on housing — that prices are up because of immigration — are backed up by a “Federal Reserve study.”
Well, there's a Federal Reserve study that we're happy to share after the debate. We'll put it up on social media. Actually, that really drills down on the connection between increased levels of migration, especially illegal immigration, and higher housing prices.
Sounds impressive, right? Or at least sounds as if it’s something. And indeed, Vance followed up “as promised” by posting….well, not exactly a Fed study. Instead, we got as my GP/BP colleague David put it, “a quote from a brief speech made earlier this year of one Fed governor speculating that it might be one factor in the future.”
But that’s not all! Economist Justin Wolfers explains:
Senator, it's best to avoid selective screenshotting.
The prior paragraph (which your staff omitted), suggests that inflation has *fallen* partly due to immigration.
You only screenshotted the second paragraph, which says the effect *could* go the other way. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So the “study” turns out to be a comment which, in context, undermines Vance’s argument about immigration in general — and instead of backing him up that “especially illegal immigration” is the problem, the non-supportive speech didn’t make any distinction at all about legal or illegal.
What’s extraordinary about this is that Vance deliberately offered support that clearly wasn’t going to hold up. After all, he didn’t have to back up his assertion, especially not in a debate format. He could have just made the claim, and let economists point out it wasn’t true down the road. Maybe it would have been yet another item in a lengthy fact-check; maybe it wouldn’t have even received that much attention. All in all, the underlying claim — that immigration causes high housing prices — wasn’t even close to the most fantastical assertion Vance made during the debate, so dressing it up with a non-existent Fed “study” seems…weird?1
Why did Vance do it?
We can’t rule out the possibility of relatively normal incompetent staff work. Someone did a search for “immigration” and “housing,” found the speech, misread it as far more supportive than it was, and then somewhere between there and Vance’s performance it transformed from a speech to a study. Could happen to anyone. Still, while the Trump campaign certainly has provided examples of incompetence, the Vance we saw in the debate seemed well-prepared, suggesting his staff is capable of their jobs.2
I think it’s likely something else. For all of their disdain for authority, Trump and his allies are happy to feed their supporters the normal kinds of back-up for their assertions that most voters want. The key here is that Trump and Vance assume that they are primarily speaking to those strong supporters, and that what they say will be filtered by a Republican-aligned media that will never call them on bogus claims. Or citations.
They know, too, that their strongest supporters won’t call them on it if they’re lied to. Is it a sign of contempt for their voters that they’ll just lie to them, even when it isn’t necessary? Yes, it is.
And, yes, Vance’s VP debate performance wasn’t particularly pitched to only strong Trump supporters; indeed, it was a rare event for a Trump ticket that did seem to be reaching out beyond that echo chamber. But habits are hard to break. At this point, the entire party machinery is so used to pitching only to GOP-aligned media and their audience that it’s probably hard for them to switch lanes when appropriate.
If they’re even capable of noticing what they’re doing any more.
What was Vance’s biggest whopper? Perhaps it was that Mexican guns are responsible for US deaths. Maybe it was that Donald Trump participated in a peaceful transfer of power in January 2021. But my money is on his extended fairy tale about how Trump as president supposedly supported the Affordable Care Act.
The one time he ran into big trouble during the debate, on the sequence about democracy and the 2020 election, wasn’t because of poor debate prepping; it was because Donald Trump won’t let his running mate tell the truth about it, and everyone outside of Trump’s strongest supporters demands the truth.