Politi-Score: Three Debates, Three Debaters

Politi-Score in parentheses; *Ames score revised slightly due to categorization error.

Most media sources agree that when Rick Perry entered the Republican presidential race, it took a lot of wind out of Michele Bachmann’s sails. When Perry appeared for the second Republican debate, the fact-check counts sort of confirmed it. Bachmann got precedence in fact-checks at Ames, where she was covered for about 1/3 of the total, but in the second debate, she only received five or 1/6 of the total. It’s also significant to note that her Politi-Score greatly improved as well. It seems the more she fades into the background, at least in this case, the more “honest” she is.

However, in the third debate, the CNN-Tea Party, she appeared to maker her “voice of the Tea Party” loud and strong again. This time she came close to getting a third of the fact checks as she did in Ames, while the truthiness dropped accordingly, although not quite as bad. Bachmann’s had more fact-checks in these three debates than any of the other candidates. On the other hand, had Rick Perry participated in the first debate in Ames, he would likely have exceeded her. He averaged ten fact checks in each of the last two debates, so by extrapolation he might have had close to 30 for the three.

All in all, Romney, Perry and Bachmann received just over 70% of the fact-checks by FactCheck.org, the Washington Post Fact Checker and PolitiFact. Here’s a closer look at the Politi-Score in PolitiFact Truth Index format as to how they did.

Politi-Score in parentheses next to each candidate's name.

Here's how Bachmann, Perry and Romney scored for each debate in attaining the overall average (Politi-Score)  shown above:

So, how did Romney suddenly score so much higher and "truthful" in the third debate on CNN? It was in the tit-for-tat book-quoting between Romney and Perry. The “Trues” that brought up Romney’s scores was his calling out Perry for stating that  Social Security was unconstitutional in his recent book “Fed Up” which both PolitiFact and the WaPo Fact Checker confirmed were true. These Trues and Mostly Trues made up over half the fact-checks on him for the CNN debates. Perry, however, only had one fact-check attributed to him regarding book quotes, while all three fact-checkers took him to task on stating that the Stimulus created zero jobs, with PolitiFact giving him a Pants on Fire.

Next, a discussion of one re-recovered ruling on a Rick Perry statement about social security as Ponzi, and a few other items of interest.