Special edition: Fact-checking our way through the midterms All 47 of our fact checks that dealt with candidates or campaign ads in 2018 are now in one place. Follow this link to...
| |  | | Democracy Dies in Darkness | | | | | | | | | | The truth behind the rhetoric | | | | | | Special edition: Fact-checking our way through the midterms All 47 of our fact checks that dealt with candidates or campaign ads in 2018 are now in one place. Follow this link to get the full rundown. We've also listed below some of our favorite fact-checks of the cycle. The 2018 campaign season has featured a bunch of Trump-like TV ads, nativist rhetoric and scurrilous statistics from candidates, super PACs and other groups. We summarized all 47 fact-checks for readers who want to bone up before Election Day. Here's the breakdown: 21 received Four Pinocchios, 12 got Three Pinocchios and seven got Two Pinocchios. We threw in two fact checks that got One Pinocchio and five with no ratings. There are phony ads linking Democrats to terrorism with no evidence, an ad falsely accusing Republican leaders of plotting to end Medicare and Social Security, and an ad in New Jersey that links a sitting senator to underage prostitutes with no evidence. Some Republican candidates are even lying to voters about how many Pinocchios we gave to their opponents. (Is nothing sacred anymore?!) Four Pinocchios - At least seven Republicans in House races are deceiving voters about our work, running ads that falsely say we gave Four Pinocchios to a Democrat's claim about coverage guarantees for preexisting conditions in the Affordable Care Act. Worse, these GOP campaigns refused to take it back when we alerted them.
- A bunch of Republicans and the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC, falsely depicted some Democrats as supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders's Medicare-for-all plan.
- The Congressional Leadership Fund might be this year's MVP in terms of Pinocchios. Here are six attack ads it ran against Democrats, each of them loaded with false or misleading claims or fearmongering about Muslims and African Americans.
|  | - Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) claimed that Republicans were planning to "get rid of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security" because of soaring deficits, but he's misquoting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who said only that it would take a bipartisan effort to scale back these programs.
- House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) took an old McConnell quote about Barack Obama and argued it was a "racist statement." (It wasn't.)
- No, McConnell doesn't traffic cocaine on the high seas. But "Cocaine Mitch" is an inspired nickname nonetheless.
- Bob Hugin, the Republican challenging Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), says he's not a Trump guy but decided to end his campaign by running TV ads falsely claiming the FBI had evidence Menendez slept with underage prostitutes. Not a Trump guy!
- Beto O'Rourke claimed he did not try to leave the scene of a DWI. Tell that to the police report that says he did.
- The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee slammed Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) in an ad for voting "against protecting people with preexisting conditions three separate times," but it latched on to minor procedural votes and ignored that Fitzpatrick voted against his party's plan to repeal and replace Obamacare when it counted.
- Under indictment, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter Jr. (R-Calif.) ran one of the most anti-Muslim ads in recent memory, linking his Palestinian Mexican American opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, to terrorists even though he's a Christian who was cleared by the FBI to work in the Obama administration.
- Rep. Kevin Cramer (R), running for Senate in North Dakota, set up a "fact-checking" website promoting a false claim that congressional estimates did not factor in the economic growth expected from Trump's tax cut.
- DNC Vice Chairman Keith Ellison, running for attorney general of Minnesota, has repeatedly denied any association with Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam known for anti-Semitic remarks. There are holes in Ellison's story and several documented links to Farrakhan.
- Did Hillary Clinton collude with the Russians to get dirt on Trump and feed it to the FBI? Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) seems to think so, but no. The answer is no.
| | | Three Pinocchios - A bunch of Republican candidates are hoping that voters forget the eight years the GOP spent opposing and trying to repeal Obamacare. They're claiming they fought to protect patients with preexisting conditions. Never mind that these protections would have been gutted had these Republicans succeeded in stopping or repealing Obamacare.
- Just about everything you read at first on Elizabeth Warren's DNA test was wrong, including one of our tweets. The Boston Globe claimed she was anywhere from 1/32nd Native American to 1/512th … or 1/64th to 1/1,024th. But those numbers badly oversimplify the science. The bottom line is that Warren has a distinct strand of indigenous genetic material in Chromosome 10.
- Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) claimed a New York hedge fund closed a factory in Wisconsin, costing 450 jobs. But the hedge fund was a minority investor without a board seat at the time.
- The Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity ran an ad saying Phil Bredesen, the Democrat running for Senate in Tennessee, supported higher gas and sales taxes as governor. That's misleading because in the end, Bredesen did not raise either tax. (In fact, the sales tax went down under his watch.)
|  | - The National Republican Senatorial Committee ran an ad claiming Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and her husband got rich off federal housing subsidies. Not so.
- Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D-N.Y.) has a pretty solid record on same-sex marriage, so it's befuddling to see him exaggerate the details and claim his poll numbers took a hit.
- Democrats cherry-picked a claim that Medicare-for-all would save $2 trillion, but the researcher who produced that estimate says his study is being twisted.
Two Pinocchios | | - Similarly, Pelosi claimed that 86 million middle-class Americans will see taxes rise under the Trump tax bill. But she was also talking about the long run (10 years) and left out the more immediate savings.
- Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) said a study showed corn, soybean and wheat farmers had lost $13 billion because of Trump's trade war. She should be more careful because there was no study, just a quote from an expert who was citing futures prices that change daily.
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