(NewsNation) — Vice President Kamala Harris made a misleading claim during Tuesday night’s presidential debate that former President Donald Trump left the country with the highest unemployment since the Great Depression, based on data from the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics.
Although unemployment reached a historic high of 14.8% during Trump’s presidency, it decreased to 6.4% by the time he left office in January 2021, data from the agency shows. Shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic primarily contributed to the unemployment rate peaking at 14.8% in May 2020 and three months prior, in February 2020, the rate was 3.5%, data shows.
The unemployment rate is calculated by the number of unemployed Americans divided by the number of those in the nation’s workforce.
During Tuesday night’s debate, Trump said his administration did a “phenomenal job with the pandemic” and claimed that the nation’s jobless rate only improved under President Joe Biden and Harris because of “bounce-back jobs.”
“It bounced back and it went to their benefit,” Trump said. “But I was the one that created them. They know it and so does everybody else.”
The May and June 2020 rates — 14.8% and 13.2% respectively — represented the highest levels of unemployment since 1948 when the Department of Labor Statistics began tracking the country’s jobless rate.
Prior to that, unemployment peaked at 10.4% in January and February of 2010 during the Great Recession, reaching 9.9% in May of that year. That was the highest rate of unemployment since 1983.
Despite Harris’ claims during Tuesday’s debate, unemployment had dropped to 6.7% by the end of 2020 as Trump’s tenure in the White House neared an end.
The rate dropped to 6.4% by Biden’s inauguration and continued to decline over the remainder of the year.
The data shows that unemployment remained under 4% for 27 months during Biden’s presidency before it climbed to 4% and eventually 4.3%, according to data.
The latest calculations include an estimated 7.1 million people who are out of work compared to 168.5 million that make up the country’s labor force.