If you’re anything like me, you’ve been plagued by a nagging question this election season: Who is Nicki Minaj voting for?

Well, according to some lyrics she recently spat on Lil Wayne’s “Dedication 4” mixtape, she’s seeing red:

"I'm a Republican, votin' for Mitt Romney/ You lazy b*tches is f*ckin' up the econ'my,"

Strong words, Ms. Minaj. Strong words.

So strong were these words that the mainstream media has run with the “Nicki Minaj is voting for Romney story” in full force. News outlets from BuzzFeed to The Washington Post have covered the topic.

Thankfully, the folks at Gawker have done a little fact checking. (Yes—a site often maligned for its lack of journalism standards has officially upped the discourse here.)

Here’s what they had to say about the now-famous line:

“I'm a Republican voting for Mitt Romney.”

“Fact check: Mostly false. A search of voter rolls in California and New York, where Minaj maintains homes, comes up empty; which means that not only is Minaj not a registered Republican voting for Mitt Romney, she's not voting at all unless she registers soon. (It's also unclear whether or not Minaj, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, is an American citizen.)”

Other sites, such as Salon and The Village Voice, have noted that—wait a second!—Minaj was probably satirizing Republicans in her rap. “Taking rappers at their literal word is almost always a no-no, especially when the lines take to the absurd,” the Voice noted.

Slate has further explained away the economy lyric, noting that her satirical view of what Republicans think is, in fact, a belief held by some in the party.

"University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan, in particular, has been using a perch at the New York Times to press for this kind of leisure shock view of the economy. The particular way this works is with the idea that by making social insurance programs more generous, the Obama administration has sapped the American worker's desire to work preventing the economy from bouncing back.

"Empirically speaking, I think this is pretty clearly wrong. An economy with adequate aggregate demand that suffers a policy-induced negative shock to its labor supply ought to see inflation—constant demand chasing fewer workers equals higher prices—which hasn't been the American experience. But there are some nice mathematical models out there of worker. preferences for leisure driving the business cycle, and that's good enough for some people.”

Wait? Are we still talking about Nicki Minaj here?

Anyway, sleep soundly, liberal America. Seems like—for now—Minaj is no threat.

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