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Newt Gingrich will take part in a Monday night debate of Republican candidates for president.
The Republican contest for the presidential nomination will pick up some steam tonight when candidates debate in Manchester, N.H. Candidates Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann will join the candidates who debated last month in South Carolina. The complete line-up also includes Herman Cain, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty and Rick Santorum.
We'll be watching the debate, commenting on it via Twitter, and looking for statements from the candidates to research and fact-check. We'll post our findings here as we complete them.
The debate is scheduled for 8 p.m. ET on CNN.
While we await the Monday night debate and our chance to fact-check claims, here's a recap of our previous fact-checks of the candidates and links to their PolitiFact scorecards.
While we await the Monday night debate and our chance to fact-check claims, here's a recap of our previous fact-checks of the candidates and links to their PolitiFact scorecards.
Michele Bachmann
Michele Bachmann, the House member from Minnesota, is a favorite among tea party activists. Recently, she hammered on President Barack Obama's record on oil exploration. "One. That's the number of new drilling permits under the Obama administration since they came into office," she said. We're not sure what she meant by that, because the facts didn't back her up -- at all. We rated her statement Pants on Fire.
Bachmann did better on a statement she made about jobs, earning a Half True. She said, "While the government grew, we lost more than 2 million jobs." We found that she wasn't correct, unless you looked at one uncommon measurement.
Read the complete Michele Bachmann file.
Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, wrote recently that Republicans need to be creative in finding low-cost solutions to problems like crime. Some states, Gingrich noted, have managed to reduce their prison populations and reduce crime rates. States "with the largest reductions in crime have also lowered their prison population," he wrote in an op-ed earlier this year. PolitiFact Georgia looked into his statement and found he was correct, so we rated his statement True.
Herman Cain
We recently looked into Herman Cain's record as CEO of Godfather's Pizza. He said, "When I became president and CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, it was supposed to go bankrupt . . . We turned it around with common-sense business principles." We found that the chain wasn't literally preparing the papers for bankruptcy, but it was troubled and Cain took steps to improve its performance significantly. We rated his statement Mostly True.
On the other hand, Cain denied that he ever said that he would not have Muslims serve in his cabinet. PolitiFact Georgia found that he had, at least three times. We gave him a Pants on Fire.
Read the complete Herman Cain file.
Newt Gingrich
Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, wrote recently that Republicans need to be creative in finding low-cost solutions to problems like crime. Some states, Gingrich noted, have managed to reduce their prison populations and reduce crime rates. States "with the largest reductions in crime have also lowered their prison population," he wrote in an op-ed earlier this year. PolitiFact Georgia looked into his statement and found he was correct, so we rated his statement True.
Gingrich got in trouble recently with some Republicans for being less than enthusiastic about a budget plan that reduced spending on Medicare by using private insurance companies. On Meet the Press, Gingrich questioned whether a plan from Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., was the best way to go. But then he backtracked after getting a storm of criticism. We detailed the developments on our Flip-O-Meter and awarded Gingrich the Full Flop.
Read the complete Newt Gingrich file.
Ron Paul
Ron Paul, a House member from Texas, is a libertarian-leaning Republican who wants to sharply curtail government spending, even in matters of defense. "We're spending $1 trillion a year on our foreign policy," Paul lamented recently. We looked into the country's budget for defense and diplomacy and found Paul was right. We rated his statement True.
He also said that due to the war in Iraq, "4,400 Americans are dead, 30,000 severely wounded and more than 100,000 are suffering from serious health problems related to post-traumatic stress syndrome." PolitiFact Texas found the statistic on post-traumatic stress syndrome is only correct if you include troops who fought in Afghanistan. We rated his statement Half True.
Read the complete Ron Paul file.
Tim Pawlenty
Tim Pawlenty was a two-term governor of Minnesota, and he's promoted himself as a fiscal and social conservative with a proven record. "For decades before I was elected, governors tried and failed to get Minnesota out of the top 10 highest-taxed states in the country. I actually did it," Pawlenty has said. We found that that Pawlenty did have an almost perfect record of keeping Minnesota out of the top 10 list for highest-taxed states, but he wasn't the first. Former Gov. Jesse Ventura achieved the same thing three years before Pawlenty became governor. We rated Pawlenty's statement Half True.
Pawlenty also has attacked President Barack Obama on health care. Pawlenty said that on the night of the Iowa caucuses, Obama "promised the nation that he would do health care reform focused on cost containment, he opposed an individual mandate, and he said he was going to do it with Republicans." We looked up Obama's campaign record and found that he did say he wanted to do health care reform with Republicans and that he opposed requiring everyone to buy insurance. He said insurance should be affordable, but he didn't dwell too much on cost containment. So we rated Pawlenty's statement Mostly True.
Read the complete Tim Pawlenty file.
Mitt Romney
Mitt Romney has some of the best poll numbers among the Republican candidates; some consider him a frontrunner. Romney has focused recent attacks on President Obama, but his attacks aren't always accurate. He recently said that, "A few months into office, (Obama) traveled around the globe to apologize for America." We looked into the claim in detail, and while we did find Obama making conciliatory diplomatic remarks, we didn't find any apologies. So we rated Romney's statement Pants on Fire.
Romney has also criticized Obama's record on jobs. "In the month of January, Canada created more new jobs than we did," Romney said earlier this year. We dug into the statistics and found he was correct, so we rated his statement True.
Read the complete Mitt Romney file.
Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum said recently, "A third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion." We found that his statistic was off -- only about 22 percent of all pregnancies end in abortion. And the effect on population would be lower if women who had abortions had children later in life. So we rated his statement False.
Read the complete Rick Santorum file.
Gary Johnson
Finally, we should note that Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, was not invited to the New Hampshire debate even though he appeared at last month's debate in South Carolina.
At that debate, Johnson said, "We have the highest corporate income tax in the world right now." We looked at tax numbers from around the world and rated that statement Mostly True.
Read the complete Gary Johnson file.
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