The same polling outfits that guaranteed Hillary's landslide are back with numbers showing Trump underwater by double digits — and they expect you to forget what happened last time.
According to the Detroit Free Press, an Economist/YouGov poll conducted Aug. 7-10 found 62% of Americans disapprove of Trump's job performance, with just 33% approving. Civiqs landed at 60% disapproval. Real Clear Politics aggregates show Trump's average approval sitting 19.4 points below his disapproval. The narrative writes itself: Trump is finished, the midterms are a formality, stay home.
Except the methodology tells a different story. That Economist/YouGov bomb? It surveyed 1,589 "U.S. adults" — not registered voters, not likely voters, just adults. Anyone who's watched these outfits operate knows that sampling adults instead of likely voters systematically overrepresents demographics that lean left. Rasmussen Reports, which at least has a track record of capturing working-class sentiment better than its peers, found Trump at 43% approve and 56% disapprove — a 13-point gap, not a 29-point chasm. Napolitan News Service, surveying 3,000 registered voters, also found 43% approve. Same president, same week, wildly different numbers. The spread is the scandal.
The Detroit Free Press dutifully catalogued every poll that makes Trump look worst while burying the methodology differences that explain the variance. Rasmussen notably "did not break down party affiliation of respondents" — meaning we can't audit whether the sample was weighted to match actual turnout or some aspirational model of the electorate. Civiqs ran an "online survey," a method that screens out the exact working-class voters who delivered Trump the Rust Belt in 2016.
This is voter suppression by spreadsheet. Oversample Democrats, undercount the tradesman in Macomb County, survey adults who've never cast a ballot, and declare the race over. The Boulder Daily Camera's Robin Abcarian was happy to connect the dots the pollsters left blank, framing Trump's warnings about democratic socialists as a "reprehensible" Red Scare — even as she documented DSA candidates winning primaries and AIPAC dumping massive cash to stop progressive Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. The left isn't hiding what it's doing. The press just refuses to call it what it is.
Trump's response? He hinted at using emergency powers to impose voter ID and limit mail-in ballots. "Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK?" he told Wayne Allyn Root on Real America's Voice. Whether that's constitutional or bluster is a fair debate. What's not debatable is that the polling industry learned nothing from 2016, and the media that commissions these numbers learned even less.
The question isn't whether Trump is popular. It's whether you can trust the people measuring it.
