President Trump’s Approval Ratings Are Often Underestimated

Donald Trump’s low approval rating has given Democrats plenty to talk about – even though it hasn’t seemed to help them all too much in elections (unless we’re counting gubernatorial wins in blue states like New Jersey and Virginia).

But how accurate of a measurement is it really? Reuters puts Trump’s approval at 37 percent, and Gallup the same, but that isn’t completely accurate when it comes to the President’s popularity among voters.

Trump “is more popular with likely voters than he is with the general public,” Reuters reported. The data “shows he polls better among people who voted in the 2016 presidential election than with the overall U.S. adult population — a group that includes both voters and non-voters.”

Remember, on Election Day 2016, only 60 percent of the public of voting age actually bothered to turn out to vote.

As recently as October, 44 percent of those that voted in 2016 said they approve of Trump’s performance according to Reuters. Compare that to his 37 percent number of all U.S. adults, irrespective of their likelihood to vote. His approval numbers among likely Republican voters is above 80, compared to 75 percent of all Republicans.

And that’s hardly the only problem with mainstream polls. As we’ve documented in the past, they tend to greatly over-sample Democrats both relative to Republicans and to their overall share of the voting public.

This discrepancy has been a common polling problem since even before Trump was president. One bombshell poll conducted by ABC in October of 2016 predicted that Hillary Clinton would win the election by an incredible 12 points in the polls. That sounded shocking, until you read the fine print and realized that they over-sampled Democrats by nine percentage points relative to their share of the U.S. population. Perhaps their goal was to try to convince potential Trump voters that their vote wouldn’t count anyway, so they might as well stay home.

Most of the top political polls that got the 2016 presidential race dead wrong are continuing to use a flawed methodology in rating President Trump’s approval ratings. Their polling method favors Democrats, women, and younger voters, according to a new analysis. The report shows that the mainstream polls over-sample an average of 29 percent more Democrats than Republicans and the results skew anti-Trump. The result is that it robs Trump of about 8 points in his approval ratings, from 46 percent to 38 percent.

In every single poll listed above, Democrats sampled outnumbered Republicans. The most egregious case of bias came from The Economist, in which 58 percent more Democrats than Republicans were polled.

Overall, only 24 percent of those sampled in the major polls (on average) are Republicans, while 37 percent are Democrats. Meanwhile, according to Gallup, 26 percent of American voters are registered Republican, while 29 percent are registered Democrats. In other words, only 3 percentage points more Democrats should be sampled in these polls, while in actuality there’s a gap of 13 points.

Is there any other explanation than that pollsters are trying to skew the results? Either that, or they’re not as good at polling as we’ve been led to believe.

Share this story with others now and show them that the media is covering up Trump’s popularity!

By Matt

Matt is the co-founder of Unbiased America and a freelance writer specializing in economics and politics. He’s been published... More about Matt

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