Georgia voters go to the polls Tuesday for Georgia’s primary elections.
To assist voters, PolitiFact Georgia and the AJC Truth-O-Meter have been fact-checking candidates’ statements for months.
We’ve taken an especially close look at the highest-profile race of this election, the crowded field of GOP candidates who want to replace retiring Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss.
Below are summaries of some of those fact checks.
For complete versions, go to: www.myajc.com/news/news/state-regional-govt-politics/.
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David Perdue: Dollar General “added 2,500 stores and 20,000 jobs” during his four-year tenure as CEO.
Perdue highlighted his business acumen in a campaign video in February, making a claim about his record as Dollar General’s chief executive officer. He joined the company in 2003 and left in 2007. In the interim, he added 2,500 stores and 20,000 jobs, he said.
The company’s annual reports note the company’s ambitious plans to open 600 to 800 stores a year. In most years during Perdue’s tenure, Dollar General exceeded those projections.
On Feb. 28, 2003, Dollar General had 6,192 stores and an estimated 53,500 full-time and part-time employees. On March 4, 2007, the company had 8,260 stores and about 69,500 full-time and part-time employees. That’s a four-year increase of nearly 2,100 stores and 16,000 workers.
Campaign spokesman Derrick Dickey said those reports are not a reliable measuring stick. We agreed those reports do not entirely match Perdue’s tenure.
We rated Perdue’s claim Mostly True.
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U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Savannah: “There are still more people uninsured today than when (Barack) Obama was elected president.”
Kingston based his claim, made during an interview March 31, on a recent nationwide Gallup poll on America’s uninsured, his staff said. The poll shows 15.4 percent of Americans were uninsured during the first quarter of 2009. Currently, 15.9 percent of Americans are uninsured. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 1 percentage point.
The Atlanta-based U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s data are similar to the Gallup poll findings. In 2008, CDC staff found 14.7 percent of Americans were uninsured at the time they were interviewed. In 2013, the number of uninsured was barely lower, at 14.6 percent. The U.S. Census Bureau found 44.8 million Americans uninsured in 2008, nearly 49 million in 2009 and 48 million in 2012.
We rated Kingston’s claim Half True.
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Former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel: “The Senate immigration bill is … filled with things like rewards for au pair agencies, Alaskan seafood processors and Vegas casinos.”
Handel used a Twitter post July 18 to denounce a 1,000-plus page immigration bill, saying it was filled with rewards for special interests, yet it does not even secure the border.
The items she complained about were part of deals fought for by industry lobbyists and included to garner support for the bill. For example, a Senate bill provision designating seafood processing as a shortage occupation, thus making it eligible for longer-term guest workers under a new visa program. Whether that classifies them as “rewards” is a matter of opinion — in this case, it’s Handel’s opinion.
We rated Handel’s statement as True.
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U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, R-Athens: According to a federal report, President Barack Obama will increase the long-term federal deficit by $6.2 trillion.
Broun’s staff said the deficit figures cited in a Sept. 29 op-ed piece were taken from articles in conservative publications, including the Heritage Foundation’s Foundry blog and National Review.
This $6.2 trillion figure has been bandied about by conservative politicos for some time. Our PolitiFact Virginia colleagues have examined a similar claim made by a congressman from that state who received a Mostly False rating for creating a misleading claim about the General Accounting Office report.
The articles Broun referenced based the $6.2 trillion claim on a January 2013 GAO report — requested by Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. — examining the health care law’s impact on the federal budget over the next 75 years. The report found that the impact depends largely on whether cost-controlling elements of the health care law are sustained over the long term, and considered two scenarios.
In the optimistic scenario where the law and those cost provisions — including reductions in Medicare payments and hospital readmission — are fully implemented, the health care law is expected to reduce the federal deficit by 1.5 percent over 75 years.
The second scenario assumes the cost-containment provisions are phased out starting in 2019. Doing that would mean the law would increase the deficit by 0.7 percent over the same time period.
Broun, like other politicos before him, repeats a selective version of the report to support his claim while omitting alternative positive findings of the same report.
We rated Broun’s claim Mostly False.
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U.S. Rep. Paul Broun: Says U.S. Reps. Phil Gingrey and Jack Kingston have “even changed votes to what I voted, multiple times.”
In general, Broun, Gingrey and Kingston have voted the same way all but a handful of times since 2013.
Broun, who made the claim during an interview March 25, needed more examples to prove this has happened multiple times.
He may be correct about what happened during an example he cited concerning Kingston and a vote on Ukraine, but there’s no way to know for sure. And if Kingston and Gingrey changed votes, there’s no way to know whether they did it because of Broun.
His evidence is thin.
We rated Broun’s claim Mostly False.
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“The David Perdue Files” website: David Perdue supports Common Core
Perdue has said in several interviews that he believes in the initial intent of Common Core as a means for states setting their own educational goals by what was proposed by the National Governors Association. Perdue, though, has said he is concerned about federal involvement in the effort.
The website is correct on some level. Perdue did initially support the concept of Common Core, like many other Republicans. But he has made it very clear he has soured on the details and now opposes it.
There is a kernel of truth here, but just a kernel.
We rated the website attack on Perdue as Mostly False.
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