Junkas' Claims With McCarthy's Name: Is the Site Right?

People typing "Kevin A. McCarthy" into the world's most popular search engine will first see the Illinois General Assembly page for state Rep. Kevin A. McCarthy (D-Orland Park), then a Wikipedia article on McCarthy.

But the third Google result is www.kevinamccarthy.com, a site paid for by the campaign committee of Jeffrey Junkas, McCarthy's opponent in the race for the 37th District House seat.

Starting with a picture of McCarthy positioned next to Rod Blagojevich's mugshot from his 2008 arrest, the site calls for voters to oust McCarthy.

In an interview with Patch, Junkas called the tactic a "low-cost, efficient way to get our message out" and cited as an example JoeBerrios.com, a site run by Forrest Claypool, Berrios' opponent in the Cook County Assessor race.

Although posts criticizing McCarthy first started appearing Sept. 20, the site was created on Jan. 14, according to domain registrar GoDaddy. All posts are attributed to "VoterJustice."

This article isn't about a current race, about the issues and beliefs people should rely on when voting. This is about the claims on a website one of the candidates chose to put into the public arena. And if the claims don't stand up, the candidate shouldn't have made them.

There are several posts on the site. This one is from "Kevin A. McCarthy Fails on Jobs."

Half of Two vs. Half of 20

Kevin A. McCarthy Fails on Jobs.  Entrenched incumbent owns an average 42% rating from the Illinois State Chamber of Commerce since 2000 ...

True and false.

Below are the results the Chamber sent when I asked for McCarthy's yearly ratings. The ratings stop at 1999, although McCarthy has been in the House since 1997.

• 2009-2010: 64 percent
• 2007-2008: 20 percent
• 2005-2006: 55 percent
• 2003-2004: 36 percent
• 2001-2002: 33 percent
• 1999-2000: 44 percent

If you add up all those numbers and divide by six, the ultimate answer is 42. For you Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fans out there, that means the ultimate question is "What is a misleading number to use when talking about your opponent's voting record on jobs?"

The Chamber doesn't look at every action a legislator takes, ranking accordingly afterward. What it does is follow certain bills each session and ranks on how many times the legislator votes the way the Chamber thinks he or she should.

Here's the number of votes they used to rank the representatives each year, sent to me by the very nice Chamber staff.

• 2009-2010: 12 bills
• 2007-2008: 7 bills
• 2005-2006: 9 bills
• 2003-2004: 11 bills
• 2001-2002: 13 bills
• 1999-2000: Not available

Note the Chamber follows a different number of votes each year. So Junkas' campaign was averaging numbers that shouldn't be averaged.

This is especially important because the site's point seems to be ranking McCarthy based on whether he's above or below 50 percent. And 50 percent of 13 bills is not the same as 50 percent of seven bills.

The Chamber wasn't able to get me the number of bills used in 1999-2000, so I'm reluctant to get a percentage based on the number of times McCarthy voted along with the Chamber since 1999. Who knows? That might also turn out to be 42.

Luckily more information was available from the next organization whose ratings Junkas' campaign cited.

Jeff Junkas' Mathemagic

and a 37% rating from the National Federation of Independent Businesses (Illinois) since 1997 for pro-jobs, pro-economic growth policies. 

False, but that might be more of a math thing.

If you average out the ratings from each year, it actually comes to just shy of 40 percent. Not 37.

If you look at the actual number of times McCarthy voted along with NFIB since 1997 (23 times out of 61 votes), it comes to just over 37.7 percent. And math rules don't change when you're in a campaign. You still round up if the decimal is 5 or higher, so that should be a 38. It's not the biggest error in the world, but it's still wrong.

Interestingly, if you omit the current session, you get 37 percent on the nose.

And what are these votes NFIB is using to rate the legislators? NFIB was able to fax over more information than the Chamber had available, so I have a couple examples of how these ratings are made.

• In the 2007-2008 session, McCarthy voted to expand the Family and Medical Leave Act to allow employees to use time off to care for in-laws. NFIB, which represents employers, disagreed with this.
• In the 1999-2000 session, McCarthy voted for the so-called "Patients Bill of Rights." NFIB disagreed with provisions that would let workers sue employers if the health-care coverage is inadequate.
• In the 2009-2010 session, McCarthy voted against legislation that would have required insurance companies cover hearing aids and cochlear implants. This was also the NFIB's stance.

What I find striking about both the NFIB and Chamber ratings is that both groups gave McCarthy positive ratings for the last session. The Chamber gave him 64 percent; the NFIB, 57 percent.

In the last session, McCarthy was one of only four Democrats in the House or the Senate to get a rating of more than 50 percent from the NFIB. McCarthy and representatives Frank Mautino, Kevin Joyce and Jack Franks all got 57 percent from the group. (In case you're curious, representatives Deborah Graham and Barbara Flynn Currie and senators Jeffrey Schoenberg and Susan Garrett all got exactly 50 percent).

Anyway, here's McCarthy's NFIB ratings year by year, followed by the number of times McCarthy voted with the NFIB and the number of votes used. Going back to a previous point, look how many different results three votes can bring depending on how many other bills a group is following.

• 2009-2010: 57 percent (4/7)
• 2007-2008: 33 percent (2/6)
• 2005-2006: 63 percent (5/8)
• 2003-2004: 38 percent (3/8)
• 2001-2002: 38 percent (3/8)
• 1999-2000: 27 percent (3/11)
• 1997-1998: 23 percent (3/13)

Agree or disagree with McCarthy's votes or the NFIB stance on them, but that's the best way to compare the two.

Equal Isn't Above

Illinois' unemployment rate has been above the national rate every year that 13-year entrenched incumbent McCarthy and the Democrats have been in control of the legislature (Ill., Dept. of Employment Security)

False.

Comparing IDES data line-by-line to national data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (which I did going back to 1990 before realizing that IDES had already done that in a separate chart) shows that Illinois had a lower rate in 1997 (4.8 percent compared to 4.9) and the rates were the same in 1998 (4.5 percent) and 2006 (4.6 percent).

Granted, McCarthy was elected late in 1997, but even without that, the Illinois Department of Employment Security's numbers just don't say what Junkas' campaign says they do.

On Jobs

Illinois has fewer jobs now in core sectors than it did 20 years ago – 359,500 fewer manufacturing jobs, 28,900 fewer construction jobs, and 17,000 fewer transportation and utility jobs.

Math, false. Point, true. Relevance, none.

I'll take it bit by bit.

Why the math is false ...

I'll be honest; I have no idea where Junkas' campaign got these numbers. I compared IDES numbers month-by-month between 2010 and 1990, I looked at averages, I looked at year to date, I looked at averages year to date, I got silly and started comparing yearly averages to each month and I never arrived at these exact numbers.

But the point of The Fact Check is not to duplicate someone's processes, but to verify his or her claims independently.

As the most recent month available under IDES' Current Employment Statistics (CES) Program was August, I looked at the loss comparing each month from January to August 2010 to the same month in 1990. (A lot of these jobs are seasonal, so there's no point in comparing construction jobs in August to construction jobs in the middle of January.) I then averaged the jobs lost in each month.

My results showed that Illinois lost 27,863 construction jobs between 2010 and 1990. That's 1,037 fewer jobs than the www.kevinamccarthy.com claimed was lost.

Manufacturing, however, appears to have lost 361,450 jobs. That's 1,950 more jobs lost than the site claimed.

As for transportation and utilities, I'm baffled. The CES groups transportation and utilities in the larger "Trade, Transportation, and Utilities" group, which lost 18,150 jobs by my calculations. But the site isn't talking about trade, just transportation and utilities.

But if you remove trade, which saw huge losses in both wholesale and retail trade, the category actually gained about 19,500 jobs.

An average 12,863 utilities jobs were lost, but no matter how hard I tried to twist, stretch and pull the transportation numbers (and you can ask the folks at Starbucks  – I'm entering my seventh hour here), they always more than compensated for the utilities jobs lost.

I couldn't find anything but a huge gain in transportation, warehousing and storage, couriers and messengers, transportation support services or any combination of those four categories. I vow on this, the second meal I've eaten at Starbucks today, that these numbers are wrong.

Why the point is true ...

No matter how you slice it, that's a lot of jobs lost in the last 20 years.

Why this all is irrelevant ...

If the implication is that Kevin McCarthy's policies are part of what killed jobs, why look at the last 20 years? He's only been in office 13 years.

I did figure out how many jobs were lost in each of those sectors since Kevin McCarthy took office, but then I realized that would be giving the site's innuendo more weight.

Even if we looked at jobs lost since 1997, it doesn't prove McCarthy's policies are what killed them. A lot of stuff happened in 1997. I graduated from high school that year (and if my graduation is what killed Illinois' manufacturing sector, I am truly sorry).

Yes, I am aware that a state legislator has more effect on jobs than I do, but no point was made here. It's the old statistical problem of correlation vs. causation. In other words, just because two things happened to come at the same time, is there any connection?

(For a funny example of how this can be twisted, the spoof religion The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has a chart "proving" pirates prevent global warming. Since the 1800s, the number of seafaring pirates has gone down and global temperatures have gone up, so ...)

If you're going to make a claim, make it. Don't point out that horrible things have happened in the last two decades, put it as the final point in an article called "Kevin A. McCarthy Fails on Jobs" and act like a point was made.

Sorry, www.kevinamccarthy.com, but not much you said here stands up.