Fact Check: Kamala Harris Claims She Inherited ‘Worst Unemployment Since the Great Depression’

CLAIM: The Biden-Harris administration inherited the “worst unemployment since the Great Depression,” Vice President Kamala Harris claimed on Tuesday at a gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists.

VERDICT: False. “This is exaggerated,” according to PolitiFact:

The unemployment rate spiked to a post-Great Depression record of 14.8% in April 2020, as the pandemic began to rage. Trump was in office then. But he didn’t “leave” Biden or Harris with a post-Depression record unemployment rate. By December 2020, the unemployment rate had fallen back to 6.4%, which was high for recent history but well below numerous spikes during recessions.

Harris delivered the same false statement during the presidential debate, Breitbart News’s Joel Pollak reported:

Vice President Harris attacked former President Trump’s economic record at the presidential debate on Tuesday night by claiming that he “left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.” That is simply false.

In January 2021, unemployment was 6.4 percent lower than it was in 2014, when President Barack Obama was in office. In fact, the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression was under Obama, at 10.0 percent in the early part of his administration.

It is true that unemployment spiked to 14.8 percent in April 2020, but that was because of coronavirus-related shutdowns, which were imposed at both the state and federal levels and kept in place longer by Democrats than Republicans.

Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.