Top 7 PolitiFact NC fact-checks of 2022
The year started with more election uncertainty than usual, followed by a lot of hot air.
Rhetoric over disputed voting districts in North Carolina gave way to an election season rife with mudslinging, braggadocio and conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court took on some highly contentious cases, including a ruling that revoked a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion — fodder for all sorts of claims by politicians and interest groups.
At the end of the year, though, PolitiFact North Carolina’s list of most-read articles features some of Republicans’ top campaign issues: crime, immigration, and critical race theory.
PolitiFact North Carolina is a WRAL partnership with PolitiFact, a Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking organization. Together, the organizations review statements made by politicians and high-profile officials across the state.
Here’s a countdown of the seven fact-checks that generated the most interest on WRAL.com.
7. Claim about McCrory, critical race theory. The top Republican contenders to be the GOP’s U.S. Senate candidate were former Gov. Pat McCrory and U.S. Rep. Ted Budd, the eventual winner of the November election. Although McCrory entered the race with more name recognition, Budd was endorsed by former President Donald Trump and enjoyed the support of big-spending GOP groups.
One of those groups, School Freedom Fund, paid for an ad that said McCrory, as governor, “put liberals in charge of the state textbook commission, appointing a Democrat majority.
“His commission mandated textbooks written by radical, woke professors pushing critical race theory, teaching our kids to hate America,” a narrator in the ad said.
The School Freedom Fund is a political action committee tied to Club for Growth Action, a prominent conservative political action committee that ultimately spent $14 million helping Budd.
While McCrory did appoint registered Democrats to the textbook commission, the ad failed to mention that his hands were tied by a state law requiring him to pick someone nominated by the state education superintendent. And, during McCrory’s time as governor, the education superintendent was a Democrat.
The ad also featured inaccurate information about how textbooks make it into classrooms. The Textbook Commission doesn’t “mandate” textbooks. It places textbooks on a menu of approved reading materials for local school boards to then choose from.
We rated the ad’s claim: Mostly False.
6. Democrat’s claim about redistricting ruling. In February, the state Supreme Court ultimately gave final approval to North Carolina’s congressional and legislative election maps — but only after rulings by lower courts.
In January, after a Wake County Superior Court denied a request for court intervention in the redistricting case, Democratic state Sen. Deb Butler of New Hanover County tweeted: “So the NC appeals court said … and I paraphrase, yeah, it is despicable, the maps are skewed, citizens will be deprived of their vote, we agree with the experts, democracy hangs in the balance, yada yada, but you know, we are partisan hacks so we gonna live with it.”
Butler generally captured the judges’ views on the election maps: They expressed “disdain” for having to deal with election maps that they acknowledged are “extreme outliers” that benefit Republicans.
However, she got a basic fact wrong: The case was heard in superior court — not the state Court of Appeals. She also gave some people the impression that the judges are affiliated with the same party or that they ruled the way they did because of their political affiliation. But they don’t belong to the same political party, and there’s also no apparent evidence that the judges ruled the way they did because of their partisan affiliation.
We rated her tweet: Mostly False.
5. Liberal group attacks Democratic legislator. During the primaries, allies of Gov. Roy Cooper attacked Democratic state Sen. Kirk deViere in hopes of replacing him with someone they believed would be more loyal to the party. A mail ad by N.C. Futures Action Fund, a liberal political action committee, accused deViere of voting no on Medicaid expansion, teacher pay and Cooper’s budget plan.
But the state Senate was never asked to vote on Medicaid expansion or the governor’s budget during the 2021-22 session, as the mailer suggested. The mailer cites deViere’s vote on Senate Bill 105 as opposing “better pay” for teachers. That bill included raises for teachers, something Cooper praised when he signed it.
DeViere lost the primary to Val Applewhite, who went on to win the Cumberland County seat.
We rated the mailer’s claim: False.
4. Democrat’s claim on bills killed by filibuster. The year began with legislation stuck in the closely-divided U.S. Senate. To break the stalemate, some Democrats pushed to do away with filibusters, which make it harder for bills to pass because ending a filibuster requires 60 votes, rather than the simple majority that it takes to pass most legislation.
U.S. Rep. Alma Adams, D-NC, was among the Democrats pushing for an end to the tool. “From 1917 to 1994, half of the bills that were successfully filibustered in the Senate were Civil Rights legislation,” she tweeted on Jan. 11.
Adams’ cited analysis by Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who wrote an article that was published in the Washington Post.
Binder said used historical sources to try to generate the list of measures that were killed by filibuster despite having support from a majority of members in both the House and Senate, as well as the White House.
However, scholars aren’t in agreement on the final numbers. At least two other experts say civil rights bills probably accounted for less than half of bills successfully filibustered during the highlighted time period.
Because of this lack of consensus, we rated Adams’ claim: Half True.
3. Republican claim about immigrant drop-offs near Charlotte. The federal government recorded a record number of crossings at the southern U.S. border this year. And in January, a reporter on the Fox News cable network tweeted that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been “releasing some illegal immigrants with misdemeanor criminal histories” in cities across the country.
Tyler Lee, a Republican who ran to represent North Carolina’s 12th Congressional District, shared the Fox reporter’s tweet and added his own commentary:
“I’ve been told by local citizens this has been happening in Huntersville #NC13 at big box retail locations. Feds aren’t notifying anyone, just making secret drops at 3am. When I’m elected, we won’t fund this illegal operation by @DHSgov.”
Lee provided no evidence for his claim. Federal, state and local authorities also told PolitiFact NC that they were unaware of any effort to transport migrants to Huntersville.
If migrants were being transported there, it’s unlikely that the drop-off would have been illegal. Migrants who are seeking asylum are allowed to stay in the U.S. until their case is heard, and federal agencies often help them find housing throughout the country. Lee lost his challenge to Adams.
We rated Lee’s tweet: False.
2. NC trooper says violent crime at an “all-time high.” The North Carolina Troopers Association endorsed Budd over former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley in the U.S. Senate race. But, in making that announcement on Aug. 10, the trooper association’s president, Ben Kral, made an inaccurate claim about the nation’s crime levels.
“With violent crime at an all-time high, it is imperative we have a U.S. senator who will support law enforcement,” Kral said in a statement to the website of the Fox News cable network. “Ted Budd is the best choice by far to be North Carolina’s next U.S. senator.”
Kral’s quote was also included on Budd’s campaign website.
While violent crime has increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the overall rate of violent crime still falls far short of records from the early 1990s.
PolitiFact North Carolina reviewed data collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and consulted multiple crime researchers to check Kral’s claim, the same way PolitiFact has checked similar claims in recent years.
Violent crime rates calculated for 2020 and 2019, the most recent years available, fall well short of high rates documented in the early 1990s.
Kral didn’t offer any evidence to support his claim, which we rated: False.
1. Smith’s claim on corporate profits. Inflation reached a 40-year high this year. And the cause varied, depending on who you listened to. Economists blamed a number of factors. Republicans blamed President Biden. And Democrats, including congressional candidate Erica Smith, blamed corporations.
“Corporate profit margins are at their highest point in 70 years. Corporations are trying to blame inflation on stimulus checks. Meanwhile, they’re overcharging us for gas, medicine, and groceries, and pocketing the difference. It’s a racket,” Smith, a former state representative, tweeted.
The first part of Smith’s tweet was accurate. Corporate profits did hit a 70-year high last year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
However, economists said it was misleading for Smith to suggest that local grocery stores and gas stations are running what she described as “a racket.” The cause of rising grocery prices is more a tale of supply and demand than of corporate greed, experts said.
We rated Smith’s tweet: Half True.
