No, Donald Trump’s poll numbers are not suddenly improving
Now that Donald Trump has made it through two major hurricane disaster responses without bumblingly getting anyone killed, and now that he’s given a United Nations speech that didn’t quite start World War III, it’s not shocking to see the mainstream media reporting that his poll numbers are inching upward. But here’s the thing: they’re not going up. It’s just not shocking to see the mainstream media incorrectly reporting that they are going up. We’ve seen this game before.
It started with a major online political news outlet cherry picking a handful of poll numbers this morning to make the phony argument that Trump’s overall approval rating is climbing. It culminated with cable news hosts spending the evening loudly pushing the same narrative. And why not? It makes for a plausible – and ratings friendly – storyline. Against all odds, Trump now has his act together and he’s rebounding! Except, again, the numbers themselves reveal that it’s simply not happening. I’ll prove it to you.
Any politician’s standing in the polls is defined by an average of the current major polls. So let’s briefly take a look at those numbers on polling aggregator site RealClearPolitics. It shows that in the Monmouth poll, Trump has gone from 42% a month ago, to 42% today. In the Reuters poll he’s gone from 40% tow weeks ago, to 39% today. In the Economist poll, he’s gone from 42% a week ago to 43% today. There’s no real movement here. These media reports are all based on the fact that he briefly dipped several points in one poll before quickly rebounding right back to where he’d been. Within the context of the other polls remaining stagnant, that’s not evidence of movement – it’s a polling glitch on the part of one polling outlet.
Yet the major media outlets just can’t wait to spin these things as if they were movement in one direction or the other. The real story, if there is one, is that Trump’s historically awful polling numbers have bottomed out and leveled off for now. We’ll have to wait to see when and how they eventually start moving. But for now they’re not moving. That makes for a dull story, so instead the media spins the numbers to create the appearance of movement when there is none. The polling averages very rarely lie, but the media is usually lying about the polling averages. Contribute to Palmer Report
