Republican front-runner Donald Trump has been calling his rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, "lyin' Ted Cruz" during this week's feuding over their wives. But among Republican voters, Trump fares no better than Cruz in assessments of their honesty.
A recent CBS News/New York Times national poll found that 54 percent of likely Republican voters think Trump is honest and trustworthy, while 53 percent say the same of Cruz. Forty percent consider Cruz not trustworthy, while 39 percent are doubtful on Trump.
The facts on Trump and Cruz show a different picture. According to Politifact ratings, Trump is less honest than Cruz. The site fact-checks candidates' public statements and rates them on a scale of accuracy: true, mostly true, half true, mostly false, false, and pants on fire.
Trump's statements don't hold up well to scrutiny -- 77 percent of his statements are rated as “mostly false,” “false,” or “pants on fire,” while only 24 percent are considered “half true” or better. Overall, Trump's false statements outnumber true ones by 53 percent.
Cruz doesn't do much better. Thirty-five percent of his statements were rated at least "half true," compared with 66 percent that were "mostly false" or worse. He has 31 percent more false statements than true ones.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich was the outlier in the poll and in the Politifact ratings. Seventy percent of Republican voters consider Kasich to be honest and trustworthy, and only 16 percent disagree. According to Politifact, 67 percent of Kasich's statements are at least half true.
Kasich lags far behind Trump and Cuz in opinion polls and has no chance of winning enough delegates to get the GOP nomination.
The CBS/NYT poll was conducted March 17 to March 20 and included 362 likely Republican primary voters with a margin of error of +/- 5.2 percentage points.
Editor's note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims -- 1.6 billion members of an entire religion -- from entering the U.S.
