In presidential race, a steady diet of political half-truths

Remember back in the day, when you were entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts?

The point of that old saying was that there’s no way we’re ever going to agree on everything. But we should at least argue about the same general reality.

If that day ever existed, it’s gone now.

Quiz: How many of the 2016 presidential candidates can you name?

Are you good with names at parties? Because we've got a lot of names and two parties here.

Everyone knows that politicians spew out constant spin, to make themselves look better or their opponents worse. But typically it’s spun in some proximity to the truth, either out of some sense of shame or a desire not to get caught in an outright falsehood.

Those unwritten rules are dead, as the fact-checking organization PolitiFact is finding out.

This nonpartisan group, aligned with the Poynter Institute in Florida, each year examines thousands of factual statements made by candidates and special-interest groups. It tries to vet them for how true and accurate they are.

These “truth-o-meters” can be as much art as science. But if you do enough of them, a clear pattern emerges over time. In the past, that pattern has been that — surprise! — politicians tell mostly the truth, most of the time.

Look at the chart I made for this column, using PolitiFact data. From Jeb Bush to Hillary Rodham Clinton to Rand Paul, the candidates got ratings of half true, mostly true or true for about two-thirds of all their statements. That is typical, and has long been so. Mitt Romney, for instance, certainly could put his foot in his mouth, but most of the time he was walking in the vicinity of the truth (60 percent of his 206 statements over the years were ranked as half, mostly or completely true.)

But all that is changing this year. Look at the three extreme outliers on the chart. More than two-thirds of the fact-based statements coming out of those three candidates’ mouths have been judged to be false.

They also happen to be the front-runners for the GOP presidential nomination.

Donald Trump has had 72 statements vetted by PolitiFact. Not a single one was found to be completely true. Meanwhile 75 percent were mostly or categorically wrong. In fact four out of his last five statements — from the one about thousands of American Muslims cheering after 9/11 to the one about the government sending refugees only to red states — have been judged to be ludicrous, “pants-on-fire” fabrications.

This is not normal, or didn’t used to be. Trump rarely retracts a statement or even bothers to nudge it closer to the truth, as his co-leader Ben Carson has sometimes done. Trump just blasts on to the next falsehood. I’ve never seen a political performance like it.

What’s most unnerving isn’t that he’s doing this carnival-barker act. It’s that it’s working.

We seem to be in a political era where evidence or data don’t matter. They never were as crucial as emotion. But now facts are being openly mocked.

It’s likely to get worse, too. If you were one of those GOP straight arrows like Jeb Bush or John Kasich, telling mostly the truth but getting your butt kicked by the serial fabricators, what would you do? It’s not easy to stay true to old principles when you’re getting Trumped.

I would love to see more study of why voters are responding so strongly to such fact-free campaigns.

Recently some researchers at Yale showed that people have tribal, ideological biases so powerful they can prevent us from even solving math problems correctly if the right answer is at odds with the answer we’d like to see. The more “cultural conflict” there is around an issue, the more peoples’ faculties become disabled. When the conflict subsides, people go back to seeing facts for what they are.

Maybe Trump is a genius at stoking cultural conflict. In any case he’s the first politician I’ve ever seen to pull off the trick of making the facts somehow completely irrelevant.

So RIP, facts. You were a steady, and useful, part of our lives for thousands of years. Please know that you are survived by some old friends, like journalism and science, that are going to miss you dearly, and are in fact right now quaking in their boots.