Q&A of the Day – Impeachment polls, what’s real & what isn’t - Part 1
Each day I’ll feature a listener question that’s been submitted by one of these methods.
Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com
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Today’s entry...
Brian - You seem to be great (with) polls. Can you look into this one specific Fox poll and tell us what you think?Is it possible this poll is accurate? Could this be, "Never-Trumper" Fake News?
Bottom Line: With Congress back in session the noise surrounding impeachment will only heat up in the House. In advance of Congress returning this week, we had a slew of polls that included impeachment questions over the past week. Out of eight accredited pollsters that polled on the question (there may be more that’s what I’ve reviewed), only two showed majorities of Americans wanting impeachment. That’s the first bit of info to be aware of – how much time was spent telling you about the 75% of polls that didn’t support impeachment compared to the 25% that did? Fake news agenda anyone? But about your question. The Fox News poll.
Yes, the Fox News poll was one of the two polls suggesting support for impeachment by majorities of Americans. It especially got a lot of play because, well it’s Fox News, so media uses perceptions about the network to advance the notion that if even a Fox News poll supports impeachment – than it’s a given that Americans want it to happen (or something to that effect). For those who’ve followed my work over the years, you know a couple of things about my use of polls. The data collected by them is useful, but simply taking them at face value and using them is generally useless. There’s almost never a perfectly sampled poll and the Fox News poll is especially absurd in its sampling.
First, it’s important to know that Fox News, nor any news network, conducts the polls themselves. Instead they pay third parties to create them for the network. In the case of Fox News, they contract with one Democrat pollster and one Republic pollster and combine the results. The samples can still get way out of whack and that’s exactly what happened this time. The sample in the Fox News poll showing 51% of Americans supportive of impeachment had this sample:
- 48% Democrats
- 40% Republicans
- 12% Independents
If that sounds flawed to you, it is, but it’s not as simple as saying that there aren’t even amounts of Republicans and Democrats sampled. I’ll explain in the second part of today’s Q&A on impeachment polls.