Pence, Harris face off in VP debate with diverging views of America

PENCE'S CLAIM: "They want to abolish fossil fuels and ban fracking, which would cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs all across the heartland."

HARRIS' RESPONSE: "I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking."

FACT CHECK: While Harris did support banning fracking as a presidential candidate, she has since fallen in line with Biden, who does not want to ban fracking. 

Biden has said that he doesn't want to add new fracking on public lands. He wants to move away from fracking to eventually get net-zero emissions. He has also argued that a transition to clear energy is necessary to keep people employed.

Biden's environmental plan calls for an end to fossil fuel subsidies and for a massive investment in clean energy, including training fossil fuel workers for clean energy jobs.

During an address in August, Biden said, "I am not banning fracking. Let me say that again. I am not banning fracking, no matter how many times Donald Trump lies about me."

In July 2019, Biden was asked during a CNN debate if there would be a place for fossil fuels, like coal and fracking, in a Biden administration. "We would make sure it's eliminated," he answered. After his comment, Biden's campaign clarified that he was referring to fracking on public lands.

--ABC News' Averi Harper

An aide to the Biden campaign told ABC News Chief Congressional Correspondent Mary Bruce they feel Harris did "great" and that she spoke directly to the American people about the things families care about, like they feel Biden did last week.

The aide also reacted to Pence's performance, arguing the vice president is just a different person repeating the same disproven statements as Trump. 

"Once again it's super clear they don't have a real pitch or message for re-election. He repeated the same lies we've heard before. It's just smoother and in complete sentences. Folks at home aren't buying it," the aide said. 

HARRIS' CLAIM: "Joe Biden has been so incredibly transparent, and certainly by contrast, the president has not. Both in terms of health records, but also let's look at taxes. We now know because of great investigative journalism that Donald Trump paid $750 in taxes. When I first heard about it, I literally said, you mean $750,000? And it was like, no, $750. We now know Donald Trump owes and is in debt for $400 million."

PENCE'S CLAIM: "The president said those public reports are not accurate and the president's also released literally stacks of financial disclosures the American people can review just as the law allows."

FACT CHECK: As a presidential candidate in 2016 and as a sitting president since, Donald Trump has released annual financial disclosure reports filed to the Federal Election Commission and the Office of Government Ethics, as required by federal laws. Trump's annual personal financial records, which are nearly 100-pages each, show his source of income, other assets, as well as liabilities.

Trump, however, has not released his personal tax records, which is not required by law but has been a decades-long tradition that has been followed by his predecessors in the White House.

Biden and Harris have differentiated themselves from Trump by releasing their federal and state tax returns -- most recently just last week, showing Biden and his wife paid roughly $290,000 in taxes to the federal government in 2019, and Harris and her husband paid about $1.2 million in federal and state taxes last year.

Harris' claim that Trump paid just $750 in taxes comes from The New York Times' recent report. According to the Times, Trump's tax records show that he paid just $750 in federal income taxes the year he ran for president and his first year in the White House.

The report also stated that Trump is personally responsible for loans and other debts totaling $421 million, "with most of it coming due within four years."

--ABC News' Soorin Kim

PENCE'S CLAIM: "When President Trump and I took office, America had gone through the slowest economic recovery since the great depression. ... We're going through a pandemic that lost 22 million jobs at the height, we've already added back 11.6 million jobs."

FACT CHECK: With September's jobs report, over 11.4 million jobs have been added since March. But job gains have slowed in the past three months, showing the recovery is starting to lose momentum.

In September, 661,000 jobs were added, which was worse than expectations. The unemployment rate also declined to 7.9%, better than expectations.

The jobs number represented a significant slowdown in the number of jobs added since the economy started opening up after the pandemic induced shutdown.

Airlines such as United and American notified over 30,000 employees that they would be laid off or furloughed because the federal aid expired. Disney, the parent company of ABC News, announced it was eliminating 28,000 theme park jobs in Florida and California, and Cineworld, parent company of Regal Cinemas, the second-largest theater chain in the United States, said Monday that it will close all of its U.S. and U.K. theaters indefinitely, affecting 45,000 employees. These positions weren't included in the September report.

In September, the number of permanent job losses increased by 345,000 to 3.8 million; this measure has risen by 2.5 million since February.

Though the expansion of the U.S. economy was slow under the start of the Obama administration during the Great Recession, in the final four years GDP growth was at a 2.3%, nearly similar to the 2.5% in the first three years of Trump, according to The Associated Press.

--ABC News' Justin Gomez, Layne Winn and Zunaira Zaki