Joe Biden’s approval rating is NOT at 33% or anything close to it. Here’s why the media is lying to you about it.
Over and over again lately, you hear the same thing: President Joe Biden’s approval rating has dropped all the way to 33%. You hear it from right leaning media. You hear it from left leaning media. You hear it on Twitter. You even hear it on Saturday Night Live. So it must be true, right? Actually it’s not even close.
All you have to do is look at a polling aggregation site like RealClearPolitics to see that Joe Biden’s average approval rating is in the low forties. The key word here is “average.” Any statistician can tell you (and in fact polling experts will tell you) that the statistically valid way to read the latest polls is to average them all together and go with the resulting number.
So why do you almost never hear the polls quoted this way by anyone in the media or pundit class? Unfortunately, the short answer is that while the polling averages are the most accurate way to look at the polls, they’re also the most boring. The averages tend to be within a reasonable range – and they don’t tend to change much. One new poll is released that’s a few points higher or lower than the average, and it shifts the average by only a fraction of a point, and that’s that. There’s just no excitement to it.
It’s much more fun for the media to grab ahold of just one poll – specifically the poll that’s on either the highest or lowest end of the range – and loudly present it as if it were the only poll. That gives the media two ratings friendly things to work with. The first is shock value. Why admit that Biden’s approval rating is in the ho hum low forties, when you can instead cite just his lowest poll number and pretend he’s at a shockingly low 33%? People hear a number that jarring and they stay tuned in. Of course the reason it’s so jarring is that it’s a statistical outlier. In other words it’s a piece of data that doesn’t fit with all the other pieces of data.
If scientists are conducting the same exact experiment over and over, and most of the results are similar to each other, but one of the results is wildly off from the others, they typically throw that result out under the assumption that something must have been wrong with that particular testing sample. Polling experts generally take a different approach by simply averaging all of the latest polling results together. It’s not the same as simply throwing out an outlier, but it’s done with the same intent of properly playing down the impact of an outlier.
But that’s the real world, where things are done with the intent of accuracy. In the media and pundit world, things are done with the intent of shocking people into staying tuned in. So of course most of the media is ignoring the vast majority of the available polling data and is instead quoting a single Quinnipiac poll which shows Biden lower than all the other polls. As if to underscore how thoroughly dishonest the media is when it comes to reporting the polls, that poll actually has Biden at 35%, but media pundits keep tripping over each other to inaccurately claim that Quinnipiac has Biden at 33%. That’s right, not only are they quoting one outlier poll out of context, they’re not even giving the number that the poll in question actually produced.
What’s stunning is that this kind of polling data is so readily available. There are popular websites devoted to cataloging it. You don’t even have to do the math. RealClearPolitics, which does a straight average of the latest polls, has Biden in the low forties. FiveThirtyEight, which does a weighted average of the latest polls, has Biden in the low forties. It’s all right there out in the open, and yet most of the mainstream media and pundit class still continue to brazenly hype the false claim that Biden’s approval rating is at 33%.
You’d think the media wouldn’t lie so brazenly about something that audiences can so easily disprove. But math turns a lot of people off, and statistical data turns even more people off, and so the media is just betting that you’re not going to bother looking up Biden’s actual approval rating for yourself. After all, why would you even think to do so? Why would it even occur to you that the media would be lying to you about something like that?
And yet this is the era we now live in. The President’s approval rating is in the boring ho hum low forties, and the media can’t figure out how to make a story out of that, so it falsely claims his approval rating is nearly ten points lower than it is, just so it can make a (false) story about how thoroughly unpopular Joe Biden is. The disturbing part is that you’ll catch MSNBC and CNN lying about Biden’s poll numbers just as often as you’ll catch Fox News lying about Biden’s poll numbers. Why? In spite of the relative slant of each channel, this isn’t about partisanship. It’s about the only thing the media ever considers these days: ratings.
It’s not just Biden’s approval rating either. During the last few presidential election cycles, the media has regularly tried to show movement in the polls when there wasn’t any. One week the media would quote only the poll that showed the frontrunner with the largest lead. The next week the media would quote only the poll that showed the frontrunner with the smallest lead, and hold it up as evidence that the race was “tightening.” Then the next week the media would go back to only quoting the poll where the frontrunner had the largest lead. This allowed the media to present these supposed major shifts as breaking news each time. But if you looked at the polling averages during these supposed wild shifts in the race, you’d see that the race wasn’t shifting at all, and that the media was merely trying to create the false appearance of movement.
It’s important to understand that this doesn’t mean the polls themselves are actually wrong. If anything, the voting totals in any given presidential election tend to fall within the stated margin of error of the final polling averages heading into election day. The further down the list you go, from presidential races, to congressional races, to local races, the less accurate the polling averages tend to become. But at least at the presidential level, the numbers tend to be proven accurate. This was even true in 2016, when the final polling averages had Hillary Clinton ahead by 4% and she won the popular vote by 2%.
It’s not that the polls are wrong. The polls – at least when looked at in a statistically valid way such as polling averages – tend to end up being correct or close to correct. The entire problem here is that the media is lying to you about what the polls say. Day after day, channel after channel, pundit after pundit, on the left, right, or center, you’re constantly lied to about what the polls say. It’s just a thing that the media always lies to you about.
After you spend an entire election cycle hearing the media lie to you about what the polls say, and then the election result ends up being nowhere close to the lies that the media fed you, you’re tempted to conclude that the polls were wrong. But that’s rarely what happens here. The polls are generally proven correct. The media just lies to you the whole time about what the polls are actually saying, and gambles that you won’t be proactive enough to look up the polling averages for yourself. If you educate yourself about what the polls actually say, and you push back against the false claims that the media keeps making about the polls, you’ll likely see a change in a positive direction.
