Brady Hurlburt - July 8, 2025
“But Don’t All Politicians Lie?”
In 2015, Angi Drobnic Holan published a wonderful article titled “All Politicians Lie. Some Lie More Than Others.” In it, she makes the case that while all politicians lie, there are meaningful differences in how often and how severely they do so.
Here is the graphic from her piece:
Her article resonates with me because indifference to political dishonesty is surprisingly common in my circles. In conversations with my peers, when I call out a politician’s lie, I’m sometimes met with “Yeah, but politicians on both sides lie.” I thought that Holan’s methods could help me argue that not every politician lies to the same degree.
To measure how much a given politician lies, Holan tallied the results of PolitiFact’s fact checks for that person between 2007 and 2015. The obvious weakness of this approach is that the samples for each politician might not be equally representative. For example, perhaps Ben Carson has a higher rate of lying than Marco Rubio because PolitiFact simply scrutinized him more closely. If Politifact kept searching, isn’t it possible that they might find more Rubio lies? Holan addresses this directly:
We don’t check absolutely everything a candidate says, but focus on what catches our eye as significant, newsworthy or potentially influential. Our ratings are also not intended to be statistically representative but to show trends over time.
This is not a criticsm of PolitiFact’s methods: they choose to invest their time checking politicians’ most important and noteworthy claims. But to compare two politicians’ lying, I need a different strategy.
Brandolini’s Law
I want to know: How often does each politician lie? But how can I possibly answer that question? PolitiFact’s haphazard sampling won’t work for me. But short of mic’ing every politician and hiring a small army of fact-checkers to verify every word, what else could I do?
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