Donald Trump, who once famously said that all negative polls are fake polls, is obsessed with watching his poll numbers. While he and his supporters laugh off any discussion over Trump’s approval rating by saying the polls were wrong in 2016, they love to brag when the numbers are high. In the Rasmussen poll, Trump’s numbers are always suspiciously higher than other polls.
Thank you! #MAGA?? pic.twitter.com/EWjwRlmIve
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 25, 2019
Trump’s favorite pollsters work at Rasmussen, and there’s definitely a reason why.
‘In 99 percent of the polls taken from Jan. 20, 2017, to April 14, 2018, Rasmussen’s Trump approval number was higher than the RCP average of polls, by an average of 4.9 points.’
Most critics won’t go as far as to say that Rasmussen polls are fake, but their tactics and language are on the murky side. While the publish polls based on pools of “likely voters,” they tend to poll Republican voters more heavily. They argue that Republicans are more likely to vote, which is true, but it skews the results of their data.
In truth, Trump’s poll numbers are nowhere near as balanced as he’d like his Twitter followers to believe. At no point in Trump’s presidency has he legitimately polled at 50 percent, as his approval rating has consistently hovered around or above 50 percent since shortly after he took office.
In truth, the average poll numbers for Trump average out at 43.5 percent. A recent Reuters poll had him at 37 percent following the release of the Mueller report. This is not good news for a sitting president entering into a new election season.
Twitter wasn’t going for Trump’s attempts to lie, either. Read some of their comments below:
Featured image via Flickr by Gage Skidmore under a Creative Commons license
