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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

Bogus Claims in Boca

Summary
In last night's debate, held days before Tuesday's Republican primary in the Sunshine State, the remaining GOP candidates came up with a few new factual distortions and repeated several old ones. Among them:

McCain said he had won the Republican vote in both the South Carolina and New Hampshire primaries, where independent voters also participate. One exit poll showed him narrowly prevailing with Republicans in New Hampshire, while another didn’t. And the same poll that favored him in that state had him losing the GOP vote to Huckabee in South Carolina.

Myrtle Beach Blarney

Summary

Another debate, another round of fact-checking. The GOP meeting in South Carolina was the third for Republican candidates in a week, but they haven’t run out of exaggerations or misstatements:

Romney claimed Massachusetts gained jobs "every single month" he was governor after hitting a low point. In fact the job gains seesawed, with seven of 36 months producing job losses.
Huckabee escalated his misleading claims about cutting taxes, saying he cut taxes for the first time in the history of the state of Arkansas,

Giuliani Visits Mistress

Q: Did Giuliani break the law using city funds while visiting his mistress?
A: No. Reporters who broke the story didn’t suggest he acted illegally.                     

N.H. Debate: The GOP Field

Summary
Republican and Democratic candidates participated in double-header debates in New Hampshire Jan. 5 in advance of the state's first-in-the-nation primary. Republicans were up first, and they got a little wild with their swings:

Romney claimed that the 47 million Americans who lack health care are not covered because they say "I'm not going to play. I'm just going to get free care paid for by everybody else." Experts say that very few who are offered insurance turn it down and that the uninsured get worse care.

Republicans Debate in Iowa

More exaggerations and misstatements in the final GOP debate before the Iowa caucuses.

The Sanctuary Spat

The Giuliani campaign says his immigration policy in New York wasn’t like that of other cities. That’s not true.

GOP YouTube Debate Flubs

The CNN/YouTube debate among Republicans lacked any talking snowmen, but we did note a few false and misleading statements by the candidates.

Bogus Cancer Stats, Again

Rudy Giuliani insists he was “absolutely accurate” to say that men with prostate cancer have a 44 percent survival rate in England, despite being contradicted by FactCheck.org, major news organizations and several cancer experts.

Mitt and Rudy’s Cherry Orchard

During the Oct. 9 Republican debate, moderator Chris Matthews unleashed a mini-brawl between former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani over their respective fiscal records. Both men spewed statistics that sometimes seemed to contradict each other. We find that each man was cherry-picking his numbers, sometimes in misleading ways.