Hillary:
Bernie Sanders:
Donald Trump:
Good to know.
I’m just surprised that almost a quarter of the time Trump is actually telling some version of the truth.
Bernie Sanders has had 78 statements checked. Hillary Clinton has had 175 statements checked. I wonder why there’s this disparity?
Sanders and Clinton both have 51% of statements ranked as “true” or “mostly true.” Sanders leads Clinton by 1% in the “False,” “Mostly False,” and “Pants on Fire” categories, but has nothing in this last category, compared to Clinton with two statements there.
I’m not sure I’m seeing a huge difference.
I would assume because Hillary has been a national figure for far longer than Bernie, though I’m not sure how long the statements evaluated stretch back from.
EDIT: Just checked – they go back to '07, so this is probably the answer.
That’s a good point. It likely includes statements from her 2008 campaign. Edit: and yes, both Pants on Fire statements are from 2008.
The response from the Republicans is so easy: it’s Politifact that is lying. Politifact is a liberal media operation. Gee, that was easy. Any more inconvenient evidence you want gratuitously dismissed?
It’s only because he says his own name so often, and gets it right.
Indeed … all candidates make thousands of statements during the course of a campaign. Why are only a few dozen from each candidate being handpicked for the “fact check” treatment? Why, it almost makes you think the whole thing is just an arbitrary process…
Care to make your insinuation explicit, so it can be examined and evaluated?
An awful lot of statements aren’t falsifiable. “We should torture more people” and “Wall Street is evil” are both just opinions that can’t be verified. Even statements like “We were better off without NAFTA” really need to have “better off” defined clearly before you call it true or not.
Also, I think you’re overestimating how much politicians are really saying. Mostly they dodge the question. When they do give an answer, it’s a selection from a few dozen talking points that get recycled to meet the audience at hand.
With the recent failure of Microsoft’s teenage-girl chat-bot, I really think they should try a politician-bot. Teach it a dozen canned phrases and some idle banter and that thing would pass the Turing test every time.
Most accurate I believe, she has the best staff and fact checkers. That is not the same as truthful. Plus those sites treat “Education spending has risen 25% in the last 5 years” as exactly equivalent to “You can keep your health plan if you like it”. A politician getting facts wrong is not much of a problem unless like Ben Carson or Donald Trump pretty much everything they cite is half true or just plain wrong. A politician outright lying to people about things that affect them is a lot more significant. Also, fact check sites can’t really analyze campaign positions which are just campaign positions, such as Clinton’s opposition to TPP, which we all know is just a campaign stance to be abandoned on Jan. 21st.
It also shows just how much of a curve we use to grade these things given that an accurate politician is saying something true or mostly true only about half the time. A poster with Hillary Clinton’s record would be ruthlessly mocked. What does it say that we hold people posting facts in their underwear at 3am to higher standards than we do Presidential candidates?
“Keep you health plan” was voted Lie of The Year for 2013 by Politifact.
Who made the education quote?
And the “keep your health plan” was still mostly true (even if Politifact didn’t rate it so) – most people could keep their health plan. It was only a small number of people who couldn’t. So he didn’t lie to me. 
I don’t know that. Instead, I think she has boxed herself in.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say here. Is this just an awkward way of saying that you consider lack of truthfulness to be knowingly lying. So, if a candidate surrounds himself with a lousy staff that keeps him ignorant of the facts so that he regularly spouts falsehoods, he is being truthful because he is not knowingly lying?
And yet you’re more than willing to vote for the less truthful candidates - why, if you want more truthfullness don’t you reward it with your vote? Instead of calling the racists “honest”
By that standard, Bush could have assured Americans that “soldiers won’t be killed in Iraq”, and he would have been telling the truth, since the vast majority of soldiers deployed to Iraq did not get killed.
It was a lie of the year because not only was it not true, but he knew it wasn’t true. Just like he knew that an individual mandate was necessary, but it was useful as a political position to distinguish himself from Clinton.
There’s a huge moral chasm between getting stuff wrong because you didn’t fact check well enough or because you wish it was true and hope it’s true, and just saying something you know not to be true because you need to trick Americans into backing your plans.
Except for Trump, there are no candidates less truthful than Hillary Clinton.
Hmm… a quick check seems to show that Politifact is rather flawed, at least with classification.
If you click on Trump’s lies, their reasons for classing some of them as lies are often disappointing. For instance, the one about the New York Times: the press have got away with lying before, so the claim is actually true. And Mitt Romney’s choice of Ryan: Romney didn’t have much of a chance beforehand and Ryan didn’t improve it enough, so the claim is actually true. Immigration? Certainly as an election theme. Deficit reduction? Politifact says, ‘Spending cuts would have to be huge’; that doesn’t make the statement itself false. And so on.
And then there’s Sanders. His claim about healthcare costs is mainly true, for instance: over 16% of GDP in the US vs 9% in the UK, 8% in Ireland. Yes, France, the Netherlands and a few others take it to 11…