Political ads and social media attacks by opponents of Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman have sought to portray Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor as dangerously soft on crime, but some of the claims stretch the facts.
The Inflation Reduction Act proposes to raise over $700 billion in new revenues over 10 years to be spent on energy, climate change initiatives, health care and deficit reduction. But not all of those revenues come via higher taxes. More than half comes from health care savings and from beefed up IRS tax enforcement.
Tudor Dixon, a GOP candidate for governor in Michigan, proposes to phase out the state’s individual income tax, but hasn’t detailed how she would cut state spending to make up for the lost revenue. The Democrats fill in the blanks in a misleading TV ad.
Two of the Republicans running for Washington’s 3rd Congressional District seat are attacking each other in TV ads about Social Security that could mislead voters.
In speaking about the Green New Deal, Herschel Walker, the former professional football player vying for a Senate seat in Georgia, incorrectly suggested that U.S. climate efforts were pointless because “China’s bad air” would simply move over into American “air space.”
U.S. presidents have little control over the price that consumers pay for gasoline. It depends mostly on the price of crude oil, which is set on the global market, based largely on worldwide supply and demand. Yet Republican campaign ads have falsely claimed or suggested that President Joe Biden and Democrats are solely to blame for the prices that motorists are paying at the pump.
Economists cite several reasons for high inflation in the United States, starting with the unprecedented circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic. But TV ads in midterm races across the country blame one culprit: stimulus spending by President Joe Biden’s administration.
Stacey Abrams, who faces Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in a rematch this fall, correctly accused Kemp’s TV ad makers of “conveniently” editing her comments about defunding the police, but she falsely claimed that the state’s violent crimes went up 55% in 2020. The actual increase was 5%.
John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, says he “never supported the Green New Deal” though he does support a longer-term transition away from fossil fuels. Nonetheless, a TV ad from the National Republican Senatorial Committee argues that Fetterman is “too radical” and misleadingly tries to put a price tag on his position, saying that Fetterman has “embraced parts of the Green New Deal that’d cost you 50,000 bucks a year.”
An illegal ballot cast on behalf of a deceased voter is rare, and we could find no examples of it occurring in Michigan in 2020 or 2016. Yet, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan falsely claims in a TV ad that “dead people always vote Democrat,” and misleadingly suggests it is a widespread problem in his state.