Fox News misleadingly claimed that a Republican Senate majority could be a “big plus” for the stock market and generate economic growth of 3 percent to 4 percent, but hid the reality that growth has already topped those levels.

On the November 3 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom, co-host Martha MacCallum warned that the midterm elections could have a “big impact on your money” and argued that despite recent stock market growth, “we could be seeing an even bigger rally if the GOP takes the Senate.” Fox Business host Stuart Varney agreed, attributing the stock market rally of the past two weeks to the fact that “Republicans look more and more likely to take the Senate,” and predicting that policies produced by a Republican-led Senate could set the economy on a path toward “3 to 4 percent” growth “instead of 2 percent.” MacCallum and Varney claimed that 4 percent growth is something the economy has not seen in “a long time”:

In reality, the American economy has grown by an average of 4.1 percent in the last six months -- while the Senate remained under Democratic control. The second and third quarters of 2014 had the strongest back-to-back growth rates the U.S. has seen since 2003, with respective growth rates of 4.6 percent and 3.5 percent. In fact, growth rates have topped Varney's arbitrary “3 to 4 percent” threshold during four of the past five quarters.

As Bloomberg News' Dave Weigel noted, Varney's speculation also ignores the Dow Jones industrial average's gain of more than 4,000 points since the 2012 election. The Dow is up more than 9,000 points since President Obama was first inaugurated in January 2009.