Fact-Checking Politicians

1. Barack Obama: PolitiFact rating distribution

True — 124Mostly True — 165Half True — 163Mostly False — 71False — 71Pants on Fire — 9

Barack Obama’s scorecard contains 603 rated checks in this snapshot. Mostly True is the largest category, with 165 entries, narrowly ahead of Half True on 163. The doughnut shows all six categories separately, allowing readers to see the substantial middle of the distribution as well as its ends. True and Mostly True together account for 47.9% of the checks; False and Pants on Fire together account for 13.3%.

These percentages describe material that PolitiFact chose to investigate. They do not describe every statement Obama made during his campaigns, presidency or later public life. The distinction matters because journalists select claims for reasons such as their public importance, prominence and apparent uncertainty. A scorecard also spans different subjects and dates, so it should not be treated as a single controlled examination. The linked profile provides the individual articles and their evidence. Counts are used to calculate the shares here, rather than relying on the website’s dynamically displayed percentages.

Source: Barack Obama scorecard. 603 rated checks; retrieved 20 October 2026. Six Truth-O-Meter categories only; excludes promise tracking and position-change ratings.

2. Donald Trump: PolitiFact rating distribution

True — 36Mostly True — 87Half True — 135Mostly False — 225False — 465Pants on Fire — 231

Donald Trump’s profile is the largest of the twenty scorecards selected for this page, with 1,179 rated checks. False is its largest category, containing 465 checks, followed by Pants on Fire with 231 and Mostly False with 225. Together, False and Pants on Fire account for 59.0% of the profile’s rated checks. The six-colour breakdown retains the distinctions between those categories instead of merging them into a single label.

The size of this scorecard makes counts and percentages especially important to separate. A larger number in one category can reflect both a larger volume of coverage and a different distribution of ratings. Neither the chart nor its total establishes what fraction of all Trump’s public statements were inaccurate. The source is an editorial selection, and repeated themes can generate separate articles. PolitiFact’s ratings assess the accuracy of the checked claims; this chart does not independently establish a speaker’s intentions or convert those judgements into a measure of deliberate lying.

Source: Donald Trump scorecard. 1179 rated checks; retrieved 20 October 2026. Six Truth-O-Meter categories only; excludes promise tracking and position-change ratings.

3. Joe Biden: PolitiFact rating distribution

Joe Biden’s scorecard contains 315 checks, distributed across the full six-category scale. Half True is the largest category, with 79 checks, followed closely by Mostly True with 77. False contains 65 and Mostly False 60. Showing the counts as horizontal bars makes the similarity of the two leading categories clearer than it would be in a simple true-versus-false division.

The intermediate ratings are substantive categories, not missing data. A claim may contain accurate elements while omitting context or leaving a misleading impression, and the individual articles explain the reasoning in each case. Reducing the six ratings to two groups can therefore change the apparent story. Later charts make such grouping choices explicit rather than calling one combined number an overall truth score. Biden’s profile also covers a different mix of roles, subjects and dates from other politicians’ profiles. Readers comparing distributions should keep those differences in mind and consult the source articles when a particular claim matters.

Source: Joe Biden scorecard. 315 rated checks; retrieved 20 October 2026. Six Truth-O-Meter categories only; excludes promise tracking and position-change ratings.

4. Mike Pence: PolitiFact rating distribution

True — 5Mostly True — 7Half True — 22Mostly False — 14False — 25Pants on Fire — 2

Mike Pence’s profile contributes 75 rated checks to this snapshot. False is the largest category, with 25 entries, followed by Half True with 22. The smaller slices remain visible in the legend: five True, seven Mostly True, fourteen Mostly False and two Pants on Fire. Keeping this profile as its own chart restores the Pence topic listed on the earlier page and makes its denominator explicit.

With fewer checks than the presidential profiles, a small number of additional entries would move Pence’s percentages more noticeably. One check is equivalent to about 1.3 percentage points of this total. That is an arithmetic observation about the displayed collection, not a statistical margin of error: the checks were not randomly sampled. The chart cannot explain why an individual statement received its rating, or attribute a pattern to loyalty, strategy or personality. Those questions require evidence beyond the category counts. The source link leads to the underlying explanations rather than only a summary judgement.

Source: Mike Pence scorecard. 75 rated checks; retrieved 20 October 2026. Six Truth-O-Meter categories only; excludes promise tracking and position-change ratings.

5. Hillary Clinton: PolitiFact rating distribution

Hillary Clinton’s scorecard has 301 rated checks. Mostly True, True and Half True are the three largest categories, at 76, 72 and 70 respectively. Their similar sizes are easier to compare with bars. True and Mostly True together represent 49.2% of this collection, while False and Pants on Fire together represent 13.3%. The six-category chart also preserves the 43 Mostly False checks that neither of those two combinations includes.

A profile can remain useful after a politician leaves a particular office or campaign, but its contents should not be mistaken for a poll of current public opinion. This is a collection of published factual assessments, not a popularity measure. The articles concern claims made at different times and in different settings. Comparing Clinton with another politician therefore combines differences in what was said with differences in what journalists selected for examination. The table keeps the original counts available so readers can reconstruct the percentages and apply their own clearly stated grouping rules.

Source: Hillary Clinton scorecard. 301 rated checks; retrieved 20 October 2026. Six Truth-O-Meter categories only; excludes promise tracking and position-change ratings.

6. Mitt Romney: PolitiFact rating distribution

True — 31Mostly True — 33Half True — 58Mostly False — 35False — 32Pants on Fire — 19

Mitt Romney’s 208 rated checks are spread across all six categories, with Half True the largest at 58. Mostly False follows with 35, while Mostly True, False and True have 33, 32 and 31. The doughnut highlights the size of the middle category without implying that the rating scale is a numerical score with equally spaced steps. Nineteen checks receive the source’s Pants on Fire rating.

The categories should be read as editorial descriptions of claim accuracy. Assigning them values from zero to five and averaging would introduce a new measurement assumption that PolitiFact’s scorecard itself does not supply. This page therefore uses counts, proportions and explicitly named combinations. Romney’s coverage also has its own historical pattern; the date this snapshot was retrieved is not the date on which every claim was made. Readers looking for changes over time would need the dates of individual checks and a consistent observation window. This overall composition cannot establish whether his statements became more or less accurate during a particular period.

Source: Mitt Romney scorecard. 208 rated checks; retrieved 20 October 2026. Six Truth-O-Meter categories only; excludes promise tracking and position-change ratings.

7. Ron DeSantis: PolitiFact rating distribution

Ron DeSantis’s profile contains 72 checks. Mostly False is the largest category with twenty entries, closely followed by False with nineteen. Half True contributes fifteen and Mostly True thirteen, while True and Pants on Fire contain three and two. The bars display those differences directly and keep the same colour assigned to each rating elsewhere on the page.

This is a smaller collection than the profiles of Obama, Trump, Biden, Clinton or Romney. Its percentages are consequently more sensitive to a few additional checks, and its subject matter reflects a different political career. A snapshot taken on one day does not make the underlying coverage periods identical. Nor does the distribution establish how often every public statement would receive a particular rating if checked. The accompanying portrait identifies the politician in an earlier congressional role; it is not dated to the scorecard snapshot. The table includes both counts and calculated shares, so the scale of this collection remains visible alongside its composition.

Source: Ron DeSantis scorecard. 72 rated checks; retrieved 20 October 2026. Six Truth-O-Meter categories only; excludes promise tracking and position-change ratings.

8. Seven scorecards on a common percentage scale

TrueMostly TrueHalf TrueMostly FalseFalsePants on Fire

The seven individual profiles are brought together here as equal-length, 100% stacked bars. Every bar uses the same six colours and category order. This removes the direct effect of unequal totals from the width of the comparison, making differences in composition easier to see. It also prevents the much larger Trump profile from taking up more space merely because it contains more checked claims.

Equal bar lengths do not make the profiles equally representative. The underlying collections range from 72 checks for DeSantis to 1,179 for Trump, and were assembled across different dates, roles and subjects. Each percentage is the number in a category divided by that person’s total. Small rounding differences may occur in displayed values, while the underlying counts remain exact. The chart is best used as a visual index to the seven profiles above. It does not rank political parties, establish an overall honesty league table or measure how likely a randomly chosen future statement is to be accurate.

Source: PolitiFact methodology and the linked individual scorecards. Retrieved 20 October 2026; percentages recalculated from counts. Editorially selected checks, not a random sample of all statements.

9. Largest scorecards among twenty selected politicians

Coverage volume varies considerably across the twenty selected politicians. This chart shows the ten largest scorecards in that group, ranked by the number of rated checks. A single blue colour is used because every bar measures the same quantity. Trump’s profile is largest, followed by Obama; the detailed table includes the remaining profiles rather than dropping them from the page altogether.

These totals measure the volume of this particular fact-checking coverage. They are not counts of speeches, interviews, campaign advertisements or unique policy issues. They also do not measure how frequently a politician speaks or how often an inaccurate statement is made. High-profile offices, long careers and recurring controversies may influence what receives attention, but the chart does not isolate those influences. Its main purpose is to supply context for percentage comparisons. A share calculated from a small scorecard and the same share calculated from a large one can look identical in a composition chart while representing very different numbers of published checks.

Source: PolitiFact methodology and the linked individual scorecards. Retrieved 20 October 2026; percentages recalculated from counts. Editorially selected checks, not a random sample of all statements.

10. Coverage volume and the False / Pants on Fire share

Each point represents one of the twenty selected politicians. The horizontal position is the total number of rated checks; the vertical position is the percentage classified as False or Pants on Fire. The scatter plot places coverage volume and one explicitly defined rating combination in the same view. Hovering or tapping a point identifies the person, while the table supplies exact counts and percentages.

The chart is descriptive. It does not show that greater scrutiny causes a higher or lower share of these ratings, because office, subject matter, time period and editorial selection all differ between profiles. There is no fitted trend line or causal claim. Small profiles also produce larger percentage changes when a single check is added. False and Pants on Fire are combined here only for this named comparison; Mostly False remains outside the numerator. Changing that definition would change the vertical positions. The full six-category distributions remain available elsewhere, preventing this one summary from replacing the more detailed evidence.

Source: PolitiFact methodology and the linked individual scorecards. Retrieved 20 October 2026; percentages recalculated from counts. Editorially selected checks, not a random sample of all statements.

11. All checks pooled across the twenty selected profiles

True — 395Mostly True — 662Half True — 741Mostly False — 675False — 893Pants on Fire — 316

This pie pools the rated checks from all twenty selected profiles. Each published check contributes one unit, so the result answers a different question from an average of twenty politicians’ percentages. Large profiles contribute more to the pooled distribution than small ones. The chart is useful for understanding the composition of the collection assembled for this page, with all six rating categories retained.

The selection is not a representative sample of American politicians, political parties or everything said in public debate. It includes the seven people already featured on the page and thirteen additional prominent figures, chosen to broaden the reference table. The resulting proportions would change if the list of people changed. They can also change when existing profiles gain checks or ratings are revised. The table and downloadable data identify every included person, making that boundary reviewable. Readers should therefore describe this as the pooled distribution of the selected scorecards, rather than the percentage of political statements that are true or false nationwide.

Source: PolitiFact methodology and the linked individual scorecards. Retrieved 20 October 2026; percentages recalculated from counts. Editorially selected checks, not a random sample of all statements. Each check has equal weight; 3682 checks across twenty selected profiles.

12. How including Mostly True changes the summary

The endpoints of each horizontal range show two different definitions: the share rated True alone, and the share rated either True or Mostly True. The distance between them is exactly the Mostly True share. This makes the effect of a grouping choice visible without replacing the original six categories with an unexplained composite score. The same seven profiles used in the opening sections are shown here.

These are not confidence intervals, uncertainty bounds or estimates of a politician’s underlying truthfulness. Both endpoints are calculated directly from the same observed scorecard counts. A long range means that including Mostly True changes the summary substantially; it does not mean that the source is less certain about that person. Different readers may reasonably want different summaries, but the definition must travel with the number. The full table allows both endpoints to be checked, along with the complementary categories that are omitted from this particular view. Read alongside the stacked comparison, the ranges demonstrate why a headline percentage needs a clearly stated denominator and rule.

Source: PolitiFact methodology and the linked individual scorecards. Retrieved 20 October 2026; percentages recalculated from counts. Editorially selected checks, not a random sample of all statements. Left endpoint: True only. Right endpoint: True + Mostly True. These are definition ranges, not uncertainty intervals.

13. Twenty politicians: fact-checking reference table

Scroll horizontally and vertically for all six rating counts and their shares. Twenty selected figures, not a complete political roster or representative sample. Totals include only the six Truth-O-Meter categories. Source links open the individual scorecards; all were retrieved on 20 October 2026.