For Carly Fiorina, it seems, the facts don’t matter as much as the message.
During the third Republican primary debate last week, Carly Fiorina said that “92 percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama’s first term belonged to women.” That figure was already debunked three years ago, when Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney used it as a talking point.
In her Sunday appearance on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Fiorina admitted that the statistic was incorrect, according to ABC News.
“I misspoke on that particular fact,” Fiorina said, backtracking on the claim. “The fact-checkers are correct,” she said. “The 92 percent—it turns out—was the first three and a half years of Barack Obama’s term and in the final six months of his term things improved.”
The broader message is what matters, said Fiorina. “But this is what the liberal media always does, it attacks the messenger trying to avoid the message,” she said. “Here is the message: It is factually true that women have been hit very hard by progressive policies.”
While it is true that most of the population was “hit hard” during the recession, it must be noted that in September, just over 70 million women held jobs—a net gain of 2.8 million jobs from the start of the recession, according to Fortune‘s analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Moreover, women hold 69% of the new jobs that were created between December 2007 and today.
