A moderately liberal Democraticly-themed blog
This week we lose two candidates from the ratings as Michelle Bachmann dropped out of the campaign on January 4th and Jon Huntsman dropped out yesterday. So we’re down to 5 GOP candidates and President Obama on the ratings.
If you aren’t aware of how I calculate these, candidates get awarded 2 points for a “true” rating, 1 point for “mostly true,” 1/2 point for “half true,” -1/2 point for “mostly false,” -1 point for “false,” and -2 points for “pants on fire.” I then divide the total points by the number of ratings to get the Truth Average. The higher the score, the better. A negative score basically means a candidate wouldn’t know the truth if it punched them in the face.
So here are the ratings as of January 17th, with the change from the scores from January 3rd in parentheses:
Obama’s rating changed for the first time since I’ve been tracking this, mainly thanks due to three “half-true” ratings and one “pants on fire” rating in the past 2 weeks (though I somewhat disagree with giving that rating “pants on fire” considering some of the things that have passed as “half-true” there. I may rate it something like “mostly false” since, yes, Perry says Israel probably would end up receiving funding, but he does say that everyone – including Israel – would “start at zero”). In any case, this is only the 5th “pants on fire” rating for Obama, which is fewer than Romney (9), Perry (12), and Gingrich (8). Paul and Santorum only have 2 and 1, but they have about 1/10th and 1/20th the number of ratings than Obama does as well. He’s also more than 2/10ths of a point ahead of anyone else, and more than double’s his likely general election opponent Romney’s score.
Paul’s spectacular drop is still going on, with this score having fallen by half since the fall. Romney hasn’t fared much better, either. Santorum has actually been doing the best, by far, lately, at least as far as Politifact ratings are concerned. With Bachmann leaving the race, Gingrich remains as the only candidate with a score which is underwater.
