According to a Fox News poll about impeachment released last week, a majority of voters (51 percent) want Trump impeached and removed from office. President Trump blasted the Fox News poll on Twitter, saying, “Whoever their Pollster is, they suck.”
From the day I announced I was running for President, I have NEVER had a good @FoxNews Poll. Whoever their Pollster is, they suck. But @FoxNews is also much different than it used to be in the good old days. With people like Andrew Napolitano, who wanted to be a Supreme….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 10, 2019
The New York Post concurs with Trump’s statement because they found the poll to be severely flawed.
The poll released last week by Fox News that claimed most Americans favor the impeachment of President Trump underrepresented Republican and independent voters, The Post has found.
The poll said 51% of voters were in favor of Trump’s impeachment and removal from office, while 40% did not want him impeached.
Princeton, New Jersey, pollster Braun Research, which conducted the survey, noted 48% of its respondents were Democrats. But the actual breakdown of party-affiliation is 31% Democrat, 29% Republican and 38% independent, according to Gallup.
If the Fox News poll had been weighted to accurately reflect party affiliation in the United States, it would have found 44.9 percent favoring impeachment, and 44.4 percent opposing, according to analysis from the New York Post. That’s still a plurality, which is arguably not great for Trump, but it’s not as significant as a majority. Many outlets jumped on the Fox News poll as proof that things look dire for Trump. But this poll really shows not much has changed.
In May of 2017, a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll found that 43 percent of voters wanted Congress to begin impeachment proceedings. That was just a few short months after Trump took office. Despite three years of an anti-Trump media scandalizing everything, there really hasn’t been huge movement of the needle on impeachment. Considering how early the POLITICO/Morning Consult poll was taken, there’s clearly a large number of people who supported impeachment from the beginning, who will always support impeachment, regardless of the merits. The Ukraine situation hasn’t changed things significantly, which says to me that it has failed to sway the public the way Democrats hoped it would have.
In a statement to PJ Media, Fox News defended the poll. “Our polling unit has long been held in high regard for being a nonpartisan source of research. Under the joint direction of Beacon Research (D) and Shaw & Company (R), the latest FNC poll included interviews with randomly chosen registered voters and – as is our standard practice – we reported the partisan distribution we found among the electorate,” said Dana Blanton, vice president of public opinion research. “Braun Research is solely our data collection partner. We stand by our latest poll.”
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Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
This article was updated to include a statement from Fox News.
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