The race to win the quickly approaching Iowa caucuses ran through a CNN debate at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, in which the front-runner was again absent and only two candidates made the debate cut: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. DeSantis and Haley took the stage Jan. 10 […]
Gov. Ron DeSantis used his annual message to the state Legislature to leave voters in Florida — and maybe caucusgoers in Iowa, too — with an inescapable message: We’re No. 1. DeSantis whisked into Tallahassee from the campaign trail on Jan. 9 to mark the first day of Florida’s 60-day session, six days before the […]
William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That could describe some of the recent historical discourse on the presidential campaign trail. First came Republican candidate Nikki Haley, who answered a question at a Dec. 27 event in Berlin, New Hampshire, about the Civil War’s cause. Haley’s answer didn’t refer […]
Republican presidential contender Nikki Haley failed to use the word “slavery” when discussing the cause of the Civil War and the fallout from the misstep had lots of politicos talking about it. That included former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. “Democrats wanted to expand slavery into western territories,” Walker posted Dec. 28, 2023, on X. “Republicans […]
Read our full fact-checking of the Jan. 10 debate > Ahead of next week’s caucuses, Republican presidential hopefuls Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley will face off in a CNN debate at 9 p.m. ET, Jan. 10, 2023, at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. As DeSantis and Haley are […]
It’s winter, that cozy season that brings crackling fireplaces, indoor gatherings — and a wave of respiratory illness. Nearly four years since the pandemic emerged, people are growing weary of dealing with it, but the virus is not done with us. Nationally, a sharp uptick in emergency room visits and hospitalizations for COVID-19, influenza, and […]
Three years of investigations and hundreds of arrests have not surfaced evidence that the FBI orchestrated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. But ahead of the insurrection’s third anniversary, one poll of more than 1,000 respondents found that 25% of U.S. adults said it was “probably” or “definitely” true that “FBI operatives […]
As U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson and other congressional Republicans gathered on the banks of the Rio Grande to highlight the migrant crisis at the Texas-Mexico border and criticize the Biden administration’s handling of it, Gov. Greg Abbott suggested that a resurfaced video appeared to show the Biden administration violating a federal court order barring […]
President Joe Biden was elected in 2020 after promising to reverse many of former President Donald Trump’s restrictive immigration policies, including some that limited people’s ability to apply for asylum at the southern U.S. border. But many Republicans, including those seeking to oust Biden in the November election, say his approach isn’t working and that […]
In campaign stops, Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has been railing against the government using eminent domain to build carbon capture pipelines on private land. Ramaswamy incorporated the topic into his stump speech in Iowa, an agricultural state and the first to vote in the primary season, and at the fourth Republican presidential debate in […]
As pundits and politicos spar over whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign will factor into the outcome of the 2024 election, one thing is clear: Kennedy’s political following is built on a movement that seeks to legitimize conspiracy theories. His claims decrying vaccines have roiled scientists and medical experts and stoked anger over whether […]
PolitiFact has a backstory with the recipient of our 2023 Lie of the Year recipient, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In August 2020, Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense sued the Poynter Institute for Media Studies (PolitiFact’s owner and publisher) in federal court alleging PolitiFact wrongly ruled false a third party’s claim that the flu vaccine was “significantly […]