For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis, the election, and more, subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.





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.