Election 2024: Lying in Politics [Podcast]

Recently New York Times fact-checkers compared a single stump speech from both U.S. presidential candidates and found former President Trump made 64 false or inaccurate statements in his speech while Vice President Kamala Harris made six such statements.

Sometimes the lies politicians tell are outrageous, like Trump alleging Haitian immigrants to the US are eating Americans pets (untrue). Harris recently alleged that, when Trump was president, he tried to end the Affordable Care Act 60 times (untrue - the Times said the number 60 referred to the "number of votes taken in Congress to change the health care law … The vast majority of those efforts preceded Mr. Trump’s presidency.”)

In this episode of Policy 360, Duke Professor Bill Adair joins us to discuss lying in politics. Adair founded the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking organization PolitiFact. His new book, Beyond the Big Lie, explores how and why politicians lie, which party does it more, and what can be done about it. This episode is part of our ongoing series of policy-focused conversations related to the 2024 election.

Guest host: Phil Napoli, Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University.

Conversation Highlights

Responses have been edited for clarity. 

On his research which indicates republicans lie more

It's an uncomfortable thing to say. It's not something people want to hear. I'm sure that there will be blowback that I'll get about it, but it's something I think we need to face. It makes it really difficult to have a conversation about public policy if one side is denying the facts about issues such as immigration, climate, elections. We need to accept facts and then have an adult conversation, but we can't if one side is rejecting those facts.

Although this book discusses this asymmetry in politics, it does not let Democrats off the hook. It's not like Democrats never lie, and I don't recall the exact percentage, but Democrats are still responsible for a huge share of lying. We shouldn't look upon this as just a Republican problem.

On his research methods

Image

One [method] was interviewing people about patterns and the reasons behind [lying], but also analyzing data from PolitiFact and The Washington Post fact-checker to look into the fact-checks that are published by them and see what sort of a disparity they showed.

Now, this is not a surprise. You go back to tallies that various organizations have done of PolitiFact fact-checks going back to 2010, they have consistently shown that PolitiFact's fact-checks show more false ratings for Republicans than Democrats. And that indeed is what we found [in the new research].

And to give us even more assurance that it was a party-wide problem, we removed Donald Trump from our data set and found that that pattern was still true with Donald [Trump] removed for both The Washington Post and PolitiFact [data sets]. So, in terms of the ratings by the fact-checkers, there's no question.

On whether the data shows selection bias

I think conservative critics probably will still reject my conclusions here and will undoubtedly say there is selection bias. But if I just take my big case study from the book and say, "Okay, is it possible that the fact-checkers are cherry-picking claims by Republicans and avoiding claims by Democrats that are false?" I can tell you from my own experience at PolitiFact, we looked every day for false claims by both parties. That was our mission. We were trying to find things that were questionable by both parties. And anytime that anyone would say, "Hey, this politician said this thing and it's not true," we would look into it.

This goes back to 2007 when PolitiFact started, and we just didn't find that there was the volume [of questionable statements] from Democrats that there was from Republicans. And even as I was researching the book, Republicans would say, "Well, you never checked Hillary Clinton on the email server." Yes, we did. "Oh, you never checked this Obama claim about Mitt Romney." Yes, we did. We gave Obama a "Pants on Fire!" [rating] for that.

So there really has always been a continuous effort by the fact-checkers to fact-check Democrats. And I truly believe that what you see in our data reflects reality. Now, will that convince my critics? No, I don't think it will because partisan feelings are very strong in this country. 

on why politicians lie

So, I talked to everyone I could and asked them that question, and that included Republican politicians, former Republican politicians, former Republican political operatives, Democratic politicians, Democratic operatives. Everyone I interviewed for this book, I asked, "Why is this the pattern?" Many people traced it back to Newt Gingrich.

The rise of Newt Gingrich in the late-1990s -- many people said changed the culture of the Republican Party and created a mentality of "anything goes." Sharp elbows came out and made the Republican politicians willing to say things that were not true because the ends justified the means. They wanted to win.

Newt set the example with things he did as the leader in the House. And that sort of bled into the culture of the party.

Some other factors - a partisan media that not only doesn't question the falsehoods, but also echoes them. And part of that is economics. As we saw in the Dominion [Voting Systems] case when Fox News did not repeat the election lies from the 2020 election, it lost viewers. It was bad business to tell the truth. So partisan media has found that there's money to be made in lying. And that has been a big factor, I think, in creating an atmosphere that has nurtured this culture.

Another factor [is] partisan gerrymandering. So, a Republican politician now is much more likely to be in a gerrymandered district and only has to answer to Republican voters. Well, those voters are a lot less likely to say, "Hey, you were caught lying." So, [that politicians is] much more willing to just say what they want. 

And one other interesting statement -- this came from Denver Riggleman, the one term Republican congressman from Virginia. Denver said that the Republican Party sees itself as part of an epic cause and that in their sort of battle that anything is okay, including lying.

So put all those things together and you can really see a culture that says, "Hey, it's okay to shade the truth. 

On solutions to the issue

One [solution is] more journalism. I think if we can get more fact-checking of politicians, I think that can be helpful. Now, I think people will read that and say, "Well, of course the fact-checker wants more fact-checking." One thing I would really like to see is more fact-checking, particularly by conservative outlets.

We did a study about a year and a half ago that we ended up calling "Fact Deserts." (This is a takeoff on the term news deserts, which is an area where there is little or no news coverage.) And what we found is that there are large swaths of the country where there's no fact-checking. So that means that a governor, a state official, a state legislator, even a member of Congress, is often never fact checked.

On how we can change politicians' behavior

Can we get politicians to reduce their lying? I'm hopeful for this reason: politicians lie because it's a calculation. They think that it pays off. They think that they get something out of it. So, if we can adjust that incentive, I think we can reduce lying.

First you have to figure out what do politicians really need in their lives? Well, they need advertising to reach their voters. And one of the prime ways they do that these days is through tech companies and social media.

It's much more valuable now for them to [use social media to] advertise directly to people in their districts and the key demographic groups in their districts that they need to reach than it is to go to a big broad audience using a broadcast audience through television.

So, it's entirely possible to get the tech companies to charge more for politicians who have worse records for fact-checking and charge lower rates, for politicians who have good records for fact-checking.

If we could get the tech companies to be bold about this, the way that Facebook, now part of Meta, did when it established its third-party fact-checking program, that could happen.

Another way to do this, which borrows an idea from a conservative group, is to get politicians to sign a pledge. Grover Norquist, a real powerhouse in Washington, runs an organization called Americans for Tax Reform. Grover's had a huge effect on American politics by getting Republican politicians to sign a pledge that they will oppose tax increases. If we could get a similar pledge against lying in politics with a powerful character like Grover, we could turn lying into an unpopular thing.

There's no reason that the Republican Party couldn't become the party of honesty. There's nothing to say that lying is part of either party's foundational beliefs. So, either [party] could grab this [idea], and really it should be part of both parties' foundational beliefs. I am optimistic that if enough people care about this, that we could change the behavior.

• Read episode transcript