In early July, just before the PolitiFact Truth Index made its debut, I had compiled my state by state PolitiFact ruling statistics in total through the end of June so I could get a broader reading—this way, I had a lot of rulings to work with. Here’s how the aggregate Politi-Score looked for Democrats and Republicans:
This seemed to be a “cleaner” and more graphically understandable way to present it, with the horizontal “combined” bars, sort of like the individual ruling spread PolitiFact has on its mobile app, but with just a red for Republican and blue for Democrats color code.
Now that the conversion from Politi-Score to Truth Index has been established, it threw my horizontal bar chart under the bus. Since the Truth Index has Half True as its zero value baseline, the horizontal bars could not be used because now there were a lot of negative scores, which cannot be handled by that type of chart. So I had to return to a vertical bar format, and here is what that looks like:
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| The total number of rulings (up to 6/30/2011) is in parentheses next to the state's name. |
Please note I am not including New Jersey because it just has too few rulings yet. And with the addition of New Hampshire, and most likely more states, I’m going to have to find another way to do this analysis. My thought right now is to compile all the rulings and then total them to determine who does the most in terms of quantity of rulings, and then do the top ten. Or, based on the calculated Truth Index, since the states I’m most interested in are those with a Truth Index favoring Republicans, like Virginia, but which is third from the bottom in terms of number of rulings. That being said, here is the original chart I published on each newspaper’s recent candidate endorsements, which may give some indication of its potential “bias”:
| Location | Newpaper(s) | Endorsements |
| National | St. Petersburg Times | Obama (08); Kerry (04) |
| Florida | St. Petersburg Times/Miami Herald | Obama (08); Kerry (04); Miami Herald endorsed Marco Rubio (R) for Senate; and Sink (D) for Gov. (10) |
| Georgia | Atlanta Journal-Constitution | Obama (08); Kerry (04) |
| Ohio | Cleveland Plain Dealer | Obama (08); no one endorsed 2004; Kasich (R ) for Gov. (10) |
| Oregon | The Oregonian | Obama (08); Kerry (04) |
| Rhode Island | Providence Journal | Obama (08); Bush (04) |
| Texas | Austin American-Statesman | Obama (08); Bush (04) |
| Virginia | Richmond Times Dispatch | McCain (08); Bush (04) |
| Wisconsin | Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel | Obama (08); no one endorsed 2004; Walker (R ) for gov. and Feingold (D) for Senate (10) |
As noted in previous posts, unless things have changed, Republican Congressman Eric Cantor’s wife is a member of the board of directors for the company that owns the Richmond Times-Dispatch, PolitiFact Virginia’s partner newspaper. And what do you know, Virginia has been pretty fairly consistently favoring the Republicans and Conservatives in its rulings, although not by much.
As for trends, the most noticeable was that Florida and Georgia seemed to have done a preponderance of rulings on Republicans so far this year. Adding Democrats and Republicans together (leaving out the negligible number of unknowns and non-partisans), 84% of Florida’s rulings were on Republicans, as were 77% of Georgia’s. All the states did more rulings on Republicans with the exceptions of Rhode Island, which was 68% rulings on Democrats, and Wisconsin, which gave Democrats a tiny edge of less than 1%.
And it’s still cheesy and sleazy in Wisconsin, which has a very low truth index for both sides of the political aisle, with Republicans actually slightly edging out Democrats. Stay tuned.
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