National

Blaming the other party

When politicians blame the other party, is one party more likely to make claims that don't hold up, or do both do it about equally?

Information checked against its sources on October 18, 2026.

First drafted by Claude, an AI model. Edited and reviewed for balance by Leonard Dalenberg. How this site is written

Side A

One party does it more.

Those on this side agree that every politician spins. But they say the record shows Republican leaders more often blame Democrats with claims that do not survive checking, and that the gap has grown over the past decade.

Different referees reach the same result. Professional fact-checkers rate Republican claims false more often. So do X's Community Notes, where a note appears only when users who usually disagree both rate it helpful: Republican posts were flagged as misleading 2.3 times as often.
Lawmakers' own links show it. Republican members of Congress link to untrustworthy news sites about nine times as often as Democratic members, and the share more than doubled after 2016.
The claims are central, not stray. During the 2025 shutdown the president said again and again that Democrats wanted $1.5 trillion for health care for illegal immigrants. The figure was the ten-year cost of their entire spending bill.
Even balanced judges agree. When panels of Republicans and Democrats together rate news sites, conservative users still share more links to low-quality ones.

On this view, blaming both parties equally rewards the one that strays further from the facts.

Side B

Both do it, and the scoring is skewed.

Those on this side say blaming the other party with exaggerations is a bipartisan habit. They argue the studies showing a gap measure what fact-checkers and researchers choose to examine as much as how politicians behave.

Democrats stretch the truth too. In 2024 the Democratic nominee said Trump intends to cut Social Security; PolitiFact rated that Mostly False. In 2025 a Democratic-aligned senator's figure of 51,000 deaths a year from the tax and spending law was found to be overstated.
Fact-checkers pick their targets. They choose which claims to check by news judgment, not by sample. PolitiFact itself says it does not measure which party lies more.
The referees disagree. Rating the same 2012 campaign, PolitiFact found Republicans less accurate, while the Washington Post's Fact Checker gave the two parties about the same average score.
Much blame is judgment, not fact. Saying a party chose something over what voters want is a characterization. No fact-check can settle it.

On this view the fix is to check each claim on its own, whoever makes it, not to keep a scorecard by party.

Other views

It is the leaders, not the voters. Some point out that the studies measure prominent figures and active social-media users. A few loud voices can drive a party's totals without saying much about its members.
It is an American pattern. Others note that the same study of lawmakers found little left–right difference in Britain and Germany, and argue that the cause lies in the American media landscape, not in conservatism itself.
Blame is the problem, true or not. Some say even accurate blame deepens division, and that the habit of treating the other party as the enemy matters more than which side is more often wrong.
Trust no referee. Others are skeptical of fact-checkers, crowd notes and researchers alike, and would have readers go to original documents and votes themselves.

Factual review

What is established

A study of 3.4 million posts by politicians in the United States, Britain and Germany from 2016 to 2022 rated links by the news site's trustworthiness, using NewsGuard's ratings. Links by Republican members of Congress to untrustworthy sites rose from 2.4 percent in 2016–2018 to 5.5 percent in 2020–2022; for Democratic members the share was 0.4 percent. British Conservatives (0.25 percent) and Germany's CDU/CSU (0.18 percent) were close to their rivals on the left.¹
A 2024 study in Nature of about 9,000 politically active Twitter users in the 2020 election found that conservative users shared substantially more links to low-quality news sites, including when quality was judged by politically balanced groups of ordinary people or by Republicans alone. Seven other data sets from 2016 to 2023, covering 16 countries, showed the same pattern.²
Of 19,569 Community Notes on X rated helpful from January 2023 to June 2024, 70 percent were on posts by Republicans and 30 percent on posts by Democrats. The authors found that Republicans were not overrepresented among users posting on X.³
FactCheck.org rated false the president's repeated claim that Democrats wanted “$1.5 trillion” for health care for people in the country illegally. The figure was the estimated ten-year cost of the Democrats' whole spending bill, and people in the country illegally are already barred from federally funded comprehensive coverage.⁴
PolitiFact rated Mostly False Kamala Harris's 2024 claim that Trump intends to cut Social Security. FactCheck.org found Sen. Bernie Sanders's 2025 figure of 51,000 deaths a year from the tax and spending law overstated: the estimate for the law itself was 42,500. In the same check it called Trump's statement that no one would die incorrect.^5,6
A worked example. On October 17, 2026, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise posted that most Americans oppose letting athletes born male compete in women's sports, and that 99 percent of Democrats voted against a ban. The numbers hold up. Gallup found in May 2025 that 69 percent of adults say transgender athletes should play only on teams matching their birth sex; about four in ten Democrats agreed. In January 2025 the House passed the ban 218–206, with two Democrats in favor and one voting present; in March 2025 the Senate fell short of the 60 votes needed, 51–45, along party lines. The post's closing line, that Democrats “choose woke over what the American people want,” is a judgment about motives, not a checkable fact.¹⁰

What is disputed

Behavior or selection? Tallies of PolitiFact's ratings have repeatedly found Republican officeholders rated False or Pants on Fire far more often: 39 percent against 12 percent in 2010–2011, and 32 against 11 percent early in Obama's second term. The author of the first tally argued this pointed to bias in which claims were chosen. PolitiFact says it picks claims by news judgment and does not measure which party lies more.⁷
Do the referees agree? In the 2012 campaign, PolitiFact rated Republicans worse while the Washington Post's Fact Checker scored the parties about evenly. A 2023 study of 749 claims checked by both Snopes and PolitiFact found only one true conflict in their verdicts once differences in rating scales and timing were allowed for.^7,8
Is a bad link a false claim? The sharing studies rate news sites, not each statement. A link to a low-rated site can carry an accurate story, and a trusted site can carry an error.^1,2
Who trusts the checks? In 2019, 70 percent of Republicans told Pew that fact-checkers tend to favor one side, compared with 29 percent of Democrats. Each side reads that gap as proof of its own case.⁹

Where it comes down to values

Scorecard or case by case. Is it useful to compare parties' records, or does it only invite each side to dismiss the referee?
Spin or falsehood. Where is the line between choosing which facts to stress and saying something untrue?
Who referees. Should the public rely on journalists, on crowds of ordinary users, on researchers, or on none of them?
Fair fight. Is blaming the other party a normal part of democratic argument, or a habit that wears away the trust democracy needs?

Sources

University of Bristol, “New research shows U.S. Republican politicians increasingly spread news on social media from untrustworthy sources,” Sept. 22, 2022. bristol.ac.uk The study: Lasser and others, “Social media sharing of low-quality news sources by political elites,” PNAS Nexus, 2022. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Mosleh, Yang, Zaman, Pennycook and Rand, “Differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions,” Nature, Oct. 2024. nature.com Abstract: comdig.cssociety.org
Renault, Mosleh and Rand, “Republicans are flagged more often than Democrats for sharing misinformation on X's Community Notes,” PNAS, June 16, 2025. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
FactCheck.org, “Trump Falsely Claims Democrats Want $1.5 Trillion for ‘Illegal Aliens,’” Nov. 10, 2025. factcheck.org
PolitiFact via PBS NewsHour, “Fact-checking warnings from Democrats about Project 2025 and Donald Trump,” Aug. 20, 2024. pbs.org
FactCheck.org, “Big Beautiful Bill Projected to Lead to Preventable Deaths,” July 17, 2025. factcheck.org
Eric Ostermeier, Smart Politics (University of Minnesota), analysis of PolitiFact ratings, Feb. 10, 2011. smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu Center for Media and Public Affairs, George Mason University, “Study: Fact-Checkers Disagree on Who Lies Most,” Oct. 22, 2012. cmpa.gmu.edu Poynter, “Study: PolitiFact finds Republicans ‘less trustworthy than Democrats,’” May 28, 2013. poynter.org
Lee, Xiong, Seo and Lee, “‘Fact-checking’ fact checkers: A data-driven approach,” Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, Oct. 26, 2023. misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu
Pew Research Center, “Republicans far more likely than Democrats to say fact-checkers tend to favor one side,” June 27, 2019. pewresearch.org
Rep. Steve Scalise, post on Truth Social, Oct. 17, 2026. truthsocial.com Gallup, Values and Beliefs survey, May 1–18, 2025. news.gallup.com CBS News, “House passes ban on transgender students in girls sports,” Jan. 14, 2025. cbsnews.com U.S. Senate Press Gallery, floor log for March 3, 2025. dailypress.senate.gov

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