Truth Index+: The PolitiFact Saga on Obamacare

In the history of PolitiFact rulings, from its beginnings in 2007 to the election of 2012, the most covered subject was healthcare. PolitiFact currently has 42 pages of rulings related to healthcare. While there's a lot of overlap with other subjects (particularly fiscal ones) as designated in every ruling, my counts for 6,535 PolitiFact rulings show healthcare and Medicare were the "main" subject(s) for over 10 percent of them.

 

In 2007, the very first characterization of a Democrat national healthcare reform plan as "socialized medicine" which earned a False was from budding 2008 presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. PolitiFact called it "pure hyperbole."   In early 2008, eventual 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney was the first person fact-checked for what would become the PolitiFact 2010 Lie of the Year--that "Obamacare" (the meme not yet invented for healthcare reform) was a "government take over" of the healthcare system.

Click to enlarge:  Low number of Democrat rulings caused larger swings

There were very few fact-checks (12) evenly divided between party on healthcare reform as it related to Obama's proposals in 2007 and 2008, compared to what happened after he became president. So the Truth Index+ at that time did not tell us much. Indeed, as I noted in a previous post on what caused the big increase in Pants on Fire assignments to Republicans, the year 2009 was a very big ruling year when it came to healthcare reform and Obamacare. In that year, over 1/4 of PolitiFact rulings related to that topic.

Obamacare, however, was the leading PolitiFact ruling topic in 2009: healthcare was the subject of over 30% of the rulings with about 27% relating to healthcare reform, and made up over 1/3 of the Pants on Fire. With the majority coming from Republicans, this was for the most part what drove up the Pants on Fire factor against them.

The year 2010 was not as important in terms of PolitiFact's concentration on Obamacare; it was a pivotal year, however, in terms of the Republicans doubling down on attacking it. Republicans dominated on dubious healthcare claims as 64 fact-checks brought their Obamacare Truth Index+ down to under 34. It continued into 2011 and worsened in 2012. The number of Obamacare-related rulings doubled from 2011 to 2012, when it seemed as if the Republicans thought the public dislike of it would get them the same type of election results as in 2010.

Truth Index+: Are Election Winners More "Truthful"?

Since PolitiFact has been through three national election cycles and a few minor ones, I've always been curious as to whether the fact-checking matters in regard to who gets elected. Or to put it another way, are those who win more "truthier" according to the Truth Index.... or less? So as an experiment, I went through the PolitiFact rulings and keyed in whether the candidate/official won or lost in a pending election from the time he or she made the statement.

But first I had to do a lot of filtering of my list of 6,535 rulings (all rulings through 11/5/12).  All the non-official people (like pundits and advocates) and groups (like websites, bloggers, chain e-mails, PACs etc.) had to go, of course. I also didn't include (or partially included) the rulings of those who retired or lost in the primaries (good example: Dennis Kucinich). There were some who won and lost, like John McCain: I rated his statements prior to his 2008 presidential election loss as a "loser" and those since as a "winner" since he won re-election as Arizona senator in 2010. Local and state elections are also excluded except for governors races. And just for the heck of it, I also keyed in those who were in the Tea Party caucus. When I got done, I was down to 2,937 rulings.

Click to enlarge:  Winners appear to make fewer False/PoF statements regardless of affiliation.

As of November 5, 2012, for all 6,535 PolitiFact rulings, the Truth Index+ is 54.2. For the 2,937 candidates making campaign statements, it was about 5 percent higher at 57. However, the "all" includes everything along with the kitchen sink. A better comparison might be to the Truth Index for those were in office at the time of the statement, which is similar to those facing elections, which was a tiny bit higher 57.7. Compared to the overall, however, what this says is that individuals and those in official positions tend to be more truthful on their own than groups or those who advocate for them. I've already shown this to be the case when I've posted calculations of the Truth Index separately for office-holders versus the various categories of advocacy groups, party boosters, media pundits, etc.

The "bias" factor would not be as relevant here because I am not looking at this in terms of Democrat versus Republican. But it's evident from these statistics that the "winners" are found more "truthful" by the PolitiFact fact-checkers than are the "losers" by about 8 percent in terms of the Truth Index+. It's about 6 percent if you re-adjust the Pants on Fire category to False.

Comparing Republicans and Democrats gets a wee bit trickier. Democrats have always held a higher Truth Index in general, and even though some say it's due to selection bias, something did emerge from the analysis of interest concerning the Republicans that can't be totally attributed to bias. While the Democrats had a pretty substantive variance between winners and losers (63.6 versus 55.8, or 14 percent), the Republican's variance was insignificantly small--53.5 versus 52.8, or about 1.5 percent. What this says is that the Republicans have about the same level of "truthiness" based on statements evaluated whether they win or lose. What this means, I don't know.

Politi-Score: 2011 First Quarter Preview

Although I've not completed the total counts of the rulings, I'd say at this point I have over 98% of them, enough to publish some preliminary charts.  

The total PolitiFact rulings from January 1 through March 31, 2011, will come to about 480, unless there's some over-production today (March 31) it might get to 500.  About 110 of the rulings came from PolitiFact National.  The preliminary breakdown by ruling is as follows, with the dashed line indicating all rulings with data labels to make it more comparable to the blue "Democrat" ruling line and the red "Republican" ruling line.  I don't expect it will change much from this come April 1. 



The Politi-Score is running 54 for the Democrats and 42 for the Republicans overall for office-holders only (to coincide with Eric Ostermeier's study, although both these charts reflect the total of rulings of PolitiFact National plus the affiliated states).  It appears from the chart above that there was a very wide divergence in the "Mostly True" category with Democrats having twice the percentage of rulings compared to the Republicans.

Another comparison many are interested in is how the averages look in relation to the 2010 Campaign cycle.  Indeed, the truth gets a beating when it's election time:

Politi-Score: Elections 2010 Part Two

Data Analysis of Organizations, Bloggers and Chain e-Mails

Imagine this conversation in a Bill Adair PolitiFact Staff meeting circa late August this year: “Now this is how I want our rulings to work on anyone other than the candidates for the upcoming campaign season….they should be about 20 percent of all rulings..and try to keep it equal between the Republicans and Democrats if you can. Overall, they should probably be less truthful than the candidates, so don’t be surprised if you have a lot of Pants on Fire……hmmm…. maybe 3/8 False and Pants on Fire, about half in the middle, and the rest True or Mostly True?” Well, I can imagine him making every part of that statement (to get to an ultimate "Barely True") except the last one, after the thoughtful “hmmm.” 

At least that’s how it worked out, almost with an uncanny precision: Of the 414 PolitiFact rulings posted between September 1 and November 1, 80 of them, about 20%, were by organizations (ranging from Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS to “Blue Oregon”), blogs (one simply called “Bloggers”), and chain e-mails (one also simply called “chain emails”). A little over half were from Republican groups. Ten percent of the rulings were equally divided between True or Mostly True, 52.5% were equally divided Half True or Barely True, and the rest (3/8 or 37.5%) equally divided between False and Pants on Fire.

Sidebar: Notes on the 2010 Election

U.S. "Personhood" Party:  As I voted yesterday, I noticed a party on my ballot which had candidates in every category, called the U.S. Taxpayers’ Party (USTPM). That day, a friend of mine told me she had voted for their candidates because they actively promoted a “fair and flat tax" on individuals as well as corporations.   I thought I’d look into it, but I found that it appears my friend has the wrong party or has them confused with somebody else. All that the U.S. Taxpayers’ Party of Michigan says with regard to taxes is “The USTPM and the Constitution Party opposes any taxes in excess of the minimum needed to fund the enumerated functions of government.” That’s it--one sentence. But the Constitution Party, with whom the USTPM is affiliated, states with regard to taxes (italics added):

We are opposed to the flat-rate tax, national sales tax, and value added tax proposals that are being promoted as an improvement to the current tax system. The Sixteenth Amendment does not provide authority for an un-apportioned direct tax.

Moreover, it is our intention to replace, with a tariff based revenue system supplemented by excise taxes, the current tax system of the U.S. government (including income taxes, payroll taxes, and estate taxes.)