After Tuesday’s vice presidential debate between Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz, PolitiFact was at it again, rating Vance false 91 percent of the time and Walz false 29 percent of the time. While defenders of professional fact-checking may say, “Aha, that proves Vance lies more,” there were problems with PolitiFact’s assessments of both candidates.
The PolitiFact team assigned five false, five mostly-false, and one half-true rating to Vance, or ten on the wrong side of the truth-o-meter and one in the middle. By contrast, Walz received one false, one mostly false, two mostly true, and three true ratings. That is two in the red and five in the green.
As for the fact-checks themselves, PolitiFact ran into some issues. For example, Vance claimed, “There's a Federal Reserve study … that really drills down on the connection between increased levels of migration, especially illegal immigration, and higher housing prices."
Rating that most-false, PolitiFact wrote, “Experts agree that increased immigration leads to higher demand for limited housing, but it is not solely, or predominantly, responsible for higher housing prices. Instead, they point to the shortage of affordable housing as the main driver of higher housing costs.”
The funny thing is, Vance would agree. Immediately after PolitiFact’s final quote mark, Vance added, “Now, of course, Margaret, that's not the entire driver of higher housing prices. It's also the regulatory regime of Kamala Harris. Look, we are a country of builders.”
Another claim that got Vance the “false” label was, “As I read the Minnesota law that (Walz) signed into law … it says that a doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion."
PolitiFact’s response begins with a non-sequitur about how rare late-term abortions are before citing a previous PolitiFact article, “When there are fetal anomalies that make it likely the fetus will die before or soon after birth, some parents decide to terminate the pregnancy by inducing childbirth so that they can hold their dying baby, Democratic Minnesota state Sen. Erin Maye Quade told PolitiFact in September.”
In other words, Vance is correct, but PolitiFact claims the baby was going to die anyway, so life-saving care is not required. In its original article, PolitiFact wrote, “Experts said cases in which babies are born following an abortion attempt are rare.”
It also cited Law Professor Laura Hermer, ‘“Post-viability abortions are very uncommon in Minnesota, as elsewhere, though they do occasionally occur. Abortions resulting in live births, while hypothetically possible, are vanishingly rare,’ Hermer said, citing data from the Minnesota Department of Health.”
“Rare,” does not mean "never,” and the new law repealed reporting requirements for births related to failed abortions.
Elsewhere, PolitiFact refused to give Walz any sort of false label for his Tiananmen Square tale where he claimed to be in China during the 1989 protests, accepting Walz’s line that he “misspoke” despite Walz's history of making things up on everything from his military experience, rank, political origin story, to his endorsements.
Walz also claimed, “Trump ‘gave the tax cuts that predominantly went to the top class. What happened there was an $8 trillion increase in the national debt, the largest ever.’"
PolitiFact rated this “mostly true” and spent its entire summary talking about who benefited most from the tax cuts, but it never mentioned the words “COVID” or “pandemic.”
While Trump added $8.4 trillion to the debt, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said that $3.6 trillion came from COVID-related spending while $2.5 trillion came from the tax cuts.
If one were to add those to Walz’s tally, instead of two out of seven being false, you would get four out of eight or 50 percent. Moving the two Vance claims to the true side, would result in a false rating of 72 percent. If you were to throw in claims PolitiFact didn’t check, such as Vance’s true claim the U.S. has built only one new nuclear facility in 40 years, or other false ones from Walz, such as blaming pro-lifers for Amber Thurmond’s death, the numbers would be even closer.
