Truth Index: How the Occu-PIE is Sliced

In order to further refine the Truth Index statistics, I decided that instead of “Office Holders” and “Non Office Holders” to define each person or group getting rated by PolitiFact precisely in terms of “who they were” and “what they did”—what some would term their “occupation”--their specific current position. In other words, if they were a person in congress, I would indicate that as “Rep (State)”, if they were a state legislator, it would be “State Rep (State)” or “State Sen (State).” And then there were the presidential candidates.

I still left a position for office holder and non-office holder. I must say this allowed me to determine that there were some people who appeared to be office holders but were not (former office holders were classified as office holders until now). So, now this category is a little more accurate. But a few thorny issues came up and here is how they were resolved. A few of the Republican presidential contenders are also office holders, the best example being Ron Paul who is also a congressional representative from Texas, as is Rick Perry as governor. For purposes of this charting, they are not being classified as presidential contenders, but in their respective “occupations.”

Earlier I did a sort of “down and dirty” estimate on advocacy groups and PACs which was determined after the rulings had been added, those with more rulings getting more research as to whether they were a PAC, advocacy group, etc. Now I am doing each individually as I go, which will hopefully give a more accurate result.

So in view of that, let’s take a look at how the PolitiFact ruling Occupational pie (the Occu-Pie) was apportioned, along with the Truth Indexes shown in parentheses (no Republican versus Democrat considered):

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It seems to be a very proportional slicing of the “pie” (for those in office, president excluded) all things considered, except maybe for the Republican presidential candidates. If I included Rick Perry, Ron Paul, Jon Huntsman and Gary Johnson (Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain were not rated through March of 2012), “Republican presidential candidates” would make up the largest percentage of rulings at just over 20% (105 rulings out of 516), with a total first quarter Truth Index of -27 instead of -31. So other than those in the media (which made up a very small percent), the presidential candidates have the highest negative Truth Index. Seventy-five of the rulings were done by PolitiFact National and New Hampshire; the presidential contenders represented over 61% of all the rulings they did in the first quarter of 2012.

Other explanatory detail: “State governing bodies” were state legislators; “local government officials” included mayors, sheriffs, county commissioners, etc. “Other” was mostly former officials and those running for office not holding any official position.

It should also be noted that this position can obviously change for each person should they win or lose an election. That would be another interesting trend indicator to look at: does it change any once that person wins the seat? Does the campaign catch one’s pants on fire more (or less)? One more item to add to my list of “potentials.”