What I Didn’t Understand About Political Lying
For American politicians, this is a golden age of lying. Social media allows them to spread mendacity with speed and efficiency, while supporters amplify any falsehood that serves their cause. When I launched PolitiFact in 2007, I thought we were going to raise the cost of lying. I didn’t expect to change people’s votes just by calling out candidates, but I was hopeful that our journalism would at least nudge them to be more truthful.
I was wrong. More than 15 years of fact-checking has done little or nothing to stem the flow of lies. I underestimated the strength of the partisan media on both sides, particularly conservative outlets, which relentlessly smeared our work. (A typical insult: “The fact-checkers are basically just a P.R. arm of the Democrats at this point.”) PolitiFact and other media organizations published thousands of checks, but as time went on, Republican representatives and voters alike ignored our journalism more and more, or dismissed it. Democrats sometimes did too, of course, but they were more often mindful of our work and occasionally issued corrections when they were caught in a falsehood.
Lying is ubiquitous, yet politicians are rarely asked why they do it. Maybe journalists think the reason is obvious; many are reluctant to even use the word lie, because it invites confrontation and demands proof. But the answer could help us address the problem. So I spent the past four years asking members of Congress, political operatives, local officials, congressional staffers, White House aides, and campaign consultants this simple question: Why do politicians lie?
In a way, these conversations made me hopeful that officials from both parties might curtail their lying if we find ways to change their incentives. The decision to lie can be reduced to something like a point system: If I tell this lie, will I score enough support and attention from my voters, my party leaders, and my corner of the media to outweigh any negative consequences? “There is a base to play to, a narrative to uphold or reinforce,” said Cal Cunningham, a Democrat who lost a Senate race in North Carolina in 2020 after acknowledging that he had been in an extramarital relationship. “There is an advantage that comes from willfully misstating the truth that is judged to be greater than the disadvantage that may come from telling the truth. I think there’s a lot of calculus in it.” Jim Kolbe, a former Republican member of Congress from Arizona who has since left the party, described the advantage more vividly: A lie “arouses and stimulates their base.”
[Tyler Austin Harper: Fact-checking is not a political strategy]
Politicians have always played to their base, but polarization has encouraged them to do little else. Now that many politicians speak primarily to their supporters, lying has become both less dangerous and more rewarding. “They gain political favor or, ultimately, they gain election,” said Mike McCurry, who served as White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton. As former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey told me, “It’s human nature to want to get a standing ovation.” Lies also provide easy ammunition for attacking opponents—no opposition research required. They “take points off the board for other candidates,” said Damon Circosta, a Democrat who recently served as the chair of North Carolina’s Board of Elections.
Anthony Fauci was often caught in the crossfire. Roger Marshall, a Republican senator from Kansas, once suggested that the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases would not give people access to his financial statements when, in fact, they were available to anyone who requested them. Republican politicians repeatedly—and falsely—accused Fauci of lying and even used his face in fundraising appeals. He brought one of the mailings to a congressional hearing: “It said ‘Fire Fauci,’” he told me, “and then, on the bottom, ‘Donate even $10, $20, $50, $100, $200.’ So there wasn’t any ambiguity.”
In the old days, “if someone would say something outlandish, they would be shamed,” Fauci said. That deterrent has disappeared. “There is no shame in lying now.”
For my study of political lying, I took a particular interest in Mike Pence. We had been friends and neighbors when he was a member of Congress, and I saw him as a typical politician who would occasionally shade the truth. When he won the race for governor in Indiana, I watched his lies grow. By the time he became Donald Trump’s vice president, he was almost unrecognizable to me.
Olivia Troye, who worked as a homeland-security adviser in Pence’s office from 2018 to 2020, saw two versions of him. “It was like watching Jekyll and Hyde sometimes,” she told me. As a boss, he was concerned about details and wanted the facts. But he would compromise all of that when he was asked to recite the Trump administration’s talking points.
“At the beginning of the COVID pandemic was probably the most honest I saw Mike Pence ever be,” she said. He addressed the nation frankly and more responsibly than Trump. But Troye cited an op-ed that he wrote for The Wall Street Journal as a turning point. Under the headline “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave,’” he claimed, in June 2020, that “we are winning the fight against the invisible enemy.” Critics rightly accused him of cherry-picking stats and ignoring reality.
But appeals to “reality” have lost their potency. Several people I interviewed described how partisan media, especially on the right, has fostered lying by degrading our shared sense of what’s real. Jeff Jackson, a Democratic representative from Charlotte, North Carolina, told me that outlets expect politicians to repeat falsehoods as the price of admission. “If you’re not willing to treat certain lies as fact, then you simply won’t be invited to address the echo chamber.” Tim Miller, a former Republican operative who left the party in 2020, pointed out that gerrymandering, particularly in red states, has made it so “most of the voters in your district are getting their information from Fox, conservative talk radio … and so you just have this whole bubble of protection around your lies in a way that wouldn’t have been true before, 15 years ago.”
[Listen: When fact-checks backfire]
The hollowing-out of local news outlets has also made lying easier. “There’s no local reporters following these races,” Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, told me. “All of these local bureaus have been just wiped out, and so there’s nobody following this shit on a day-to-day basis and keeping people accountable.”
Experimental studies have found that fact-checking really can convince people. Often, however, the academic findings don’t reflect the real world. Voters rarely seek out fact-checking aimed at their party, and conservatives in particular hear constant criticism of the enterprise, which makes them doubt its validity. (According to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center, 70 percent of Republicans believe that fact-checkers favor one side, while only 29 percent of Democrats do.)
If politicians lie because they believe they’ll score more points than they’ll lose, we have to change the calculus. Tech and media companies need to create incentives for truth-telling and deterrents for lying. Platforms of all kinds could charge higher ad rates to candidates who have the worst records among fact-checkers. Television networks could take away candidates’ talking time during debates if they’re caught lying.
But these reforms will demand more than just benign corporate intervention. They’ll need broad, sustained public support. Voters may not be willing to place truthfulness over partisan preference in every case. But more will have to start caring about lies, even when their candidate is the culprit.
This essay has been excerpted from Bill Adair’s new book, Beyond the Big Lie.