A New York Times chart comparing statements made by presidential candidates that were checked by PolitiFact may shed some light as to why Jeb Bush and other mainstream Republicans are failing to track with GOP voters. To put it bluntly, they’re far too honest in a race in which truth matters little, if at all, to most of the voters.
PolitiFact.com, a project operated by the Tampa Bay Times, in which reporters and editors from the publication and its affiliated media outlets fact-check political statements, shows a positive correlation between making less than truthful statements and high polling numbers among Republican presidential candidates.
During the primary cycle, Republican front-runner Donald Trump has had the highest percent of "pants on fire" ratings (statements shown to contain no truth whatsoever) and the second highest percentage of "mostly false, or worse" ratings at 75 percent, trailing only Ben Carson, who comes in at 84 percent by that metric. In turn, Carson is a close second to Trump in "pants on fire" ratings. Carson had the least amount of statements rated "true, or mostly true" at 4 percent, while Trump was only at 7 percent by that metric.
Surging Texas Senator Ted Cruz had the third highest ranking of "mostly false, or worse" at 66 percent, with only 22 percent coming in at "true, or mostly true." Florida Senator Marco Rubio had the best score of the four candidates with double digit support in the polls, with 40 percent of his rated statements coming in at "mostly false, or worse" and 38 percent as "true, or mostly true."
Meanwhile, Jeb Bush, who is barely hanging on with 3-4 percent of support among Republican voters, had much better scores on Politifact's Truth-O-Meter. For Bush, only 32 percent of his statements rated "mostly false, or worse" with 48 percent "true, or mostly true." Rand Paul and Chris Christie also had 32 percent in the first category with even higher ratings than Bush on the "true, or mostly true" side and are doing even worse than he is in the polls. Those numbers suggest that being truthful is not conducive to success in the GOP primary.
Making true statements seems to be something Democratic candidates are much more likely to do. In fact, not one single Republican in the field scored as well as any of the three remaining Democrats. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' statements were ranked most honest of everyone scored, with 54 percent of his fact-checked statements rated "true, or mostly true" and only 28 percent "mostly false, or worse." Hilary Clinton was right behind Sanders with scores of 51 and 28. Martin O'Malley had the lowest percent of statements ranked "mostly false, or worse" of all candidates of either party at 25 percent.
Democrats also fared much better among high-profile former office holders who have been vocal during this election cycle. Former President Bill Clinton came in with a ratio of 50 percent "true, or mostly true" and only 24 percent "mostly false, or worse" and President Obama came in at a similar 48/26, while former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney scored a lowly 30/59 in those ratios, respectively.
The most obvious explanation for the dynamic is Republican voters' reluctance to punish dishonest candidates in terms of support. Why this is the case is hard to say for sure, but it seems as if voters who support the least honest candidates, aren't as concerned with whether what they say is true, as whether or not it fits their own ideological narrative.
I see that in a lot in emails we get here at TBT from very angry voters wanting to know why we're not covering some particular story they dug up online. They often accuse our tiny, independent publication of being part of the "liberal" or "mainstream" media and assert that we are aiding in some sort of conspiratorial cover-up. From time to time, I'll send them back a well-documented response that demonstrates that the story they sent is a complete fabrication or hoax that has usually been thoroughly debunked, something they themselves would have seen had they taken a few seconds to research it and were willing to read reports that weren't on obscure websites that always seem to have the word patriot or liberty in the domain name.
Almost without exception, their response is not apologetic or even grateful. Rather, they express a position that it doesn't really matter whether the story itself is true, because the idea behind it is rock solid–at least from their perspective. They merely want someone to give voice to the way they think things are, facts be damned. Candidates like Trump, Cruz and Carson fill that vacuum. There is clearly a market among Republican voters for simple solutions to very complex problems. Because complex problems rarely have simple solutions, being able to include fictional fabrications provides a huge advantage.
Another metric worth considering is the trend in education levels among Republican voters. Trump's support is by far the strongest with white Republicans in the Midwest and South who do not have a college degree. He does well in all geographical areas by the last metric, getting 32 percent of support from Republicans who may have some college, but do not have a bachelor's degree, and gets only 8 percent from those who do. Trump's support jumps to 46 percent among Republicans with a high school diploma or less.
This is important. In the last two presidential elections, Republican voters with and without a college education each made up about 50 percent of the party’s electorate. Trump’s utter dominance of non-college-educated Republicans has occurred while those with a college education remain largely split between a number of candidates.
Ben Carson had enjoyed a solid lead among this demographic before he began to sink in the polls in recent weeks, which isn’t surprising, considering he’d stumbled mostly by revealing a very limited grasp on many of the more complicated issues, while also making some of the most intellectually offensive statements in the race.
Educated voters tend to punish candidates in terms of support when they reveal themselves to not know as much about the issues as they portend. It frightens them when someone like Carson, who they may have assumed was broadly intelligent just because he's a talented neurosurgeon, says he thinks the Egyptian pyramids were grain silos built by Bible characters, or that he’s skeptical of FDA approved vaccination schedules. Many of Trump’s supporters aren’t as concerned as to whether their candidate's outlandish statements about vaccines or immigrant rapists are true; they just want him to voice their anger and promise to do something they approve of, regardless of how feasible or effective it would be.
There is indeed a paradox for those trailing Trump. His supporters clearly don’t care what he says, or whether or not it’s true. You can’t out-Trump the Don, that’s for certain. Were Bush, Rubio, Christie, et al to begin competing for that vote, they’d likely lose much of their current support base, while gaining little of Trump’s. The hope of the party is that their more educated, non-single issue voters will ultimately coalesce around one candidate not named Trump and make this thing into a race.
However, as we’ve seen, the only candidates even close to Trump’s numbers are those with the next worse records on the Truth-O-Meter. None of this bodes well for Republicans in the general election, where the electorate at large is typically less forgiving when it comes to the integrity of a candidate’s statements–just ask Mitt Romney what happened when his campaign tried to shake the Etch-A-Sketch.
This is the trick-bag I’ve been talking about for the past three Presidential election cycles. The Republican base has become so dominated by a radical, fringe element of the party that for a candidate to get out of the primaries, they must render themselves completely un-electable for the general. Rather than ease up, the base has convinced itself that settling for more mainstream candidates like McCain and Romney after they made a hard right during the primaries, only to trip when they pivoted back even a little bit for the general, was the mistake, rather than their beating them up too badly along the way.
This line of thinking has a lot of the GOP base convinced that it’s only a Donald Trump or maybe a Ted Cruz that can get them to the White House, not even a far-right Tea Party darling like Marco Rubio, who could end up being the "establishment“ candidate, something that would have seemed all but impossible just a short time ago. In reality, the November voters would likely warm much more to candidates like Jeb, Chris Christie or John Kasich, none of whom are even in contention for the nomination. I’m sure Hillary Clinton must be thrilled.
Dennis
Maley is a featured columnist for The Bradenton Times. His column
appears each Thursday and Sunday. Dennis' debut novel, A Long Road Home,
was released in July, 2015. Click here to order your copy.
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