March High Five: Our most-clicked items for the month

In the month leading up to the Wisconsin presidential primary, readers looked to PolitiFact Wisconsin for insights on the two Democrats and three Republicans who remain in the race.

Our High Five list of our most-clicked items in March was dominated by the national candidates.

Here’s a look:

1. An In Context article explored statements by GOP front runner Donald Trump, who said in Green Bay that women should be punished for having an abortion.

The comment stirred swift criticism from both Republicans and Democrats in what was a difficult week for Trump. On the same day he made the comments, Trump’s campaign tried to undo the damage and issued a statement saying he meant that if abortion were outlawed, doctors who perform abortions should be punished.

2. House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican from Janesville, said "There is a precedent" for not nominating someone to the U.S. Supreme Court "in the middle of a presidential election."

We could find no instances in which a president faced with a Supreme Court vacancy during a presidential election year did not make a nomination. Indeed, it occurred five times between 1912 and 1940, and each time the nominee was confirmed.

We rated the statement False.

3. Readers clicked on our round up story --  Final Five -- on the Truth-O-Meter  -- where we summarized the Truth-O-Meter performance of Republicans Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, and Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

4. A 2015 claim from Sanders who said "the top one-tenth of 1 percent" of Americans "own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent."

That claim repeated a finding from a study by two internationally known economists that was supported by two other major economists we contacted. But the study has been criticized, for example, for not including Social Security in the wealth calculations.

We rated the statement Mostly True.

5. A claim from political consultant Bill McCoshen, a former Republican state official, who said Sanders said "something very similar" to what conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley had written as a college student in the 1990s -- that "women have a legitimate role in date rape."

McCoshen was referring to a 1972 column written by Sanders in a Vermont alternative newspaper that made reference to a woman fantasizing about being gang raped. Both Sanders and Bradley wrote about rape in ways that were offensive to some women, although their columns were about different and broader topics.

We rated the claim Half True.