I just took a quick survey of all the various fact checks of last night’s debate and totted them up. The following list includes only items that I judged (a) fairly important and (b) pretty clearly wrong or misleading, which means I left out several close calls. Here they are:
- Trump says Wisconsin is $2.2 billion in the hole
- Trump denied lobbying Bush for casino gambling in Florida
- Trump says he never went bankrupt
- Trump says vaccines lead to autism
- Trump says illegal immigration costs us $200 billion per year
- Trump says Mexico doesn’t have birthright citizenship
- Fiorina says HP doubled its revenue under her leadership
- Fiorina says sting video showed baby “with its heart beating, its legs kicking”
- Fiorina says Obama did nothing on immigration reform
- Christie says Social Security will be insolvent in “seven or eight years”
- Christie says he supported medical marijuana
- Cruz says Planned Parenthood sells fetal body parts for profit
- Cruz says Iran gets to inspect itself
- Paul says vaccines lead to autism
- Huckabee says Hillary Clinton is under investigation by the FBI
- Carson says a better fence was responsible for cutting illegal immigration in the Yuma sector
So the final score is: Trump 6, Fiorina 3, Christie 2, Cruz 2, Paul 1, Huckabee 1, and Carson 1.
Apparently Bush, Rubio, Walker, and Kasich didn’t say a single thing that was badly wrong. Good for them.