How PolitiFact uses the MAGA-Meter to monitor presidential campaign promises

Candidates make a lot of promises along the campaign trail. And journalists have a duty to verify and track these after elected officials take power. 

PolitiFact, a nonprofit fact-checking website operated by the Poynter Institute, has been keeping score of how many campaign promises have been delivered and broken by each president since 2009. First, came the Obamameter, followed by the Trump-O-Meter and the Biden Promise Tracker. They recently launched the MAGA-Meter as Trump took office for the second time on Jan. 20 (to date, only one campaign promise has been broken).

We reached out to Louis Jacobson, chief correspondent at PolitiFact, to learn more about how — and why — they track presidential campaign promises as well as fact checking resources for journalists.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What is the process for checking campaign promises for the MAGA-Meter, and does it differ from your previous trackers?

Jacobson: The way our system works is, these are all promises that were things said, or tweeted, or whatever by the president during the campaign. For instance, there’s a bunch of things [Trump’s] acted on that he never said during the campaign, and so those are not in our campaign promises. Anything about the Panama Canal, anything about Greenland, anything about Canada, the Canadian tariffs, the Mexican tariffs, these are all things that he first started talking about after he was elected.  

Our consistent methodology has been that we look at what the president — or the candidate then — puts forward as the agenda while he or she is the candidate. What we’re looking at is: What they told the voters they were going to do, and what they ended up doing. If they make promises after they’re elected, that’s a different story, and we don’t track that. We might cover it as a news story, of course, but we wouldn’t track it as one of the official promises. We don’t keep adding promises into our database after they’ve won the election.

As disinformation continues to spread, the role of journalists and fact checkers is more important than ever. How is the MAGA-Meter filling this need?

Jacobson: We have always seen this as part of our overarching mission, which is kind of twofold. First, the fact checks. The idea is to provide voters with information about whether their politicians are saying things that are accurate or not. Our standard for a claim that we want to check is something along the lines of, if you hear something or see something in the media that a politician is saying, you think to yourself, “Huh, I wonder if that’s true.”

And then dovetailing with that, is more on the promises side. We want to provide accountability journalism, and so that’s why we focused on the campaign promises that they made before the voters voted. Those are what they said they were going to do. Our promise updates are value neutral in that we don’t say whether this is a good idea or a bad idea. All we’re doing is tracking what they did after they said they would do something.

There are five ratings that we give: “Promise Kept,” “Promise Broken,” and then there’s “Compromise”; those are our three final ratings. Everything at the end of a president’s term gets sorted into one of those three. In the interim, for the four years or the eight years that they’re in office, there are ratings “In the Works” or “Stalled.” Our job with Biden in the past few weeks before the inauguration, was to move all the ones that were in the “In the Works” category or the “Stalled” category to one of the final three ratings.

After covering the promises of multiple administrations, what have been the biggest surprises from a journalism perspective?

Jacobson: You never know what’s going to come up. We caution people against direct comparisons between different presidents. You don’t know where it’s going to end up. 

In terms of Biden, it ended up being basically exact: one-third promises kept, one-third compromised, and one-third promises broken. I’m not sure I would have been able to predict where that would fall. I thought maybe it would be more on the promises broken, which is the case for Trump. Trump had 53% of promises broken, Biden had 34%, and Obama had 23%. You never know where it’s going to end up. 

As I went through all of our coverage of the Biden promises, I thought a lot about how we structure our system for tracking these promises. It was really noticeable how focused the promises that we track were because we track only the campaign promises. It is now early 2025, and he made these promises in 2020 — sometimes even in 2019. It was a whole different world. Then, there were a lot of COVID promises that we put on the meter. And COVID, you know, for good reason, was not the top issue, or even close to the top issue, by the time the 2024 campaign came along, or the end of his presidency in 2025. 

So the promises are a bit of a time capsule about what was important during that period, four years ago, or even eight years ago. Some promises are completely irrelevant by the time we give them a final rating. And some very important ones were never discussed. Biden, in the 2020 campaign, didn’t talk at all about inflation because inflation didn’t exist in a serious way back then. So [it’s] always worth looking at these campaign promises with a grain of salt because they are what they campaigned on, but they may not be relevant four years later.

How do you know what to follow up on?

Jacobson: From our perspective as a fact checking organization, we always are looking for checkable claims that we can rate for their truth accuracy. That’s not always possible. Sometimes Trump — or any politician — will say things that are opinions, and we can’t fact check opinions. They’ll say things that are predictions. They’ll say things that aren’t verifiable, or at least easily verifiable, because there’s no independent arbiter out there. 

You sometimes have to just figure out, okay, the stuff you said is really interesting; but from our perspective as a fact-check organization, there are some things that are really in our wheelhouse that we need to fact check, and some things that are better left to other media outlets because they’re not focused on fact checking and don’t have to fit within that mold.

We have to remember that our distinguishing characteristic as a media outlet is the fact checking, and so we don’t want to completely set aside rated fact checks, even though some of the work that I’ve done and that all of us have done doesn’t necessarily fit into that nice box and may have be written as a regular story instead of a rated fact check.

What are some helpful fact-checking resources you recommend for journalists?

Jacobson: If it’s not too self-serving, check us out, and our competitors. If you’re wondering about something, we may not have fact checked it, but there’s a chance that we did. Google the topic and the term “fact check” and our coverage should come up, as well as other fact checkers like FactCheck.org, Washington Post Fact Checker, New York Times Fact Check, and some of the wire services [for example: AFP Fact Check, AP Fact Check, Reuters Fact Check]. 

We take this work seriously, and we do a lot of digging into the databases, the documents, the transcripts, and videotaped evidence. And we do reporting with experts who know something about the field. We give all of the evidence and provide a source list at the end of each article, as well as links to the documents and databases so that you can do your own digging.

There’s a lot of data out there that I use all the time at the FRED website, [Federal Reserve Economic Data]. It’s got all kinds of data from various federal agencies, a lot of employment economic data, but also other types of data. I hope that continues to stay online as other websites are being taken down. But that’s a huge one for me. 

I do a lot of charts. In the past couple of years, even before I start doing any reporting, I’ll just download the data into a chart and then use that to share with my sources. But also it helps me conceptualize things. And when we go back to a speaker who says something, and I can show the data, and here’s the link to the data, you can do it yourself. It can really be a helpful visualization as part of your reporting.

What advice would you give an emerging accountability journalist covering a president for the first time?

Jacobson: I don’t want to be too light hearted about this, but Trump says a lot. There is a firehose of claims and information that are coming out, and there’s no possible way to cover it all. Keep your expectations in check. Because for this president — not necessarily for all presidents — but for this one, it appears that he’s going to be saying a lot of things, and it’s going to be hard to keep up with him.