News Reporter: Fact Checker: #Math is hard -- Bernie Sanders and superdelegates edition

Friday, 3 June 2016

Fact Checker: #Math is hard -- Bernie Sanders and superdelegates edition

The truth behind the rhetoric

#Math is hard — Bernie Sanders and superdelegates edition

The primary season is coming to a close — what will we do with our Tuesday nights?! — with six states essentially completing the process on June 7. Bernie Sanders has been bemoaning the “absurd” superdelegate system of the Democratic Party, which requires a combination of 4,051 delegates elected through primaries and 714 “superdelegates” (elected officials and other influential Democrats who can back whomever they want).

This week, Sanders said it was “factually inaccurate” for the media to declare Hillary Clinton the presumptive nominee on June 7. So we checked the math. Clinton needs 34 percent of the delegates left through June 7 (which she almost certainly will meet), and Sanders needs 69 percent (an almost impossibly high bar), to meet the threshold for the Democratic nomination.

That means Clinton would have won the nomination even without superdelegates, and she is on track to do so by June 7. As for superdelegates, Clinton has 543 and Sanders has 44. There’s no way for Sanders to make up for that now.

So Sanders is being misleading. Technically, the nominee is chosen at the convention. But based on the math, on June 7, Sanders will have lost the race for both pledged delegates and superdelegates. We awarded Three Pinocchios.

(Courtesy of giphy.com)

Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here for the weekly newsletter. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we’ll check it out.

In non-2016 campaign news

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell resurrected an old talking point to take a jab at President Obama in an MSNBC interview this week. McConnell said: "People are legitimately unhappy. The average person is about $3,000 or $4,000 a year worse off today than when President Obama came to office.”

He should’ve double-checked those numbers, which are four years out of date. This calculation is based in research by a nonpartisan economic consulting firm, which produces a monthly snapshot of median household incomes using the Census data. Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign used the $4,000 figure in 2012, even making it into a campaign ad.

Updated figures show that even after taking inflation into account, median household income is now slightly higher than when Obama took office, not "$3,000 to $4,000" lower.

Still, there’s been virtually no growth in income (inflation-adjusted) since 2000 — an issue politicians raise often. But that’s not an Obama-specific issue; a president has only limited control over the overall direction of the economy. McConnell received Four Pinocchios.

Help us find ads, statements, speeches, quotes and figures that don’t quite pass muster. Send your fact-check suggestions: fill out this form, e-mail us or tweet us at @myhlee, @GlennKesslerWP or using #FactCheckThis. Read about our rating scale here, and sign up here for our weekly Fact Checker newsletter.

Scroll down for this week’s Pinocchio round-up.

— Michelle Ye Hee Lee