CNN Released a Favorable Trump Election Poll, Then They Tried To Hide It
CNN is being accused of burying a poll it conducted that showed good news for President Donald Trump, who is leading by a wide margin among voters in 15 battleground states.
The CNN poll, which was conducted by SSRS and surveyed 1,112 respondents — including 1,001 registered voters — between May 7 and May 10 found that the president has a commanding lead overall in battleground states when compared to former Vice President Joe Biden.
Voters in the states of Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin cumulatively favor Trump by 7 percentage points.
Among the 583 registered voters living in those key battleground states, Trump leads Biden 52 percent to 45 percent, according to the survey, which was released on Wednesday.
The margin of error for that subset of voters was plus- or minus-5.3 percentage points.
Nationally, the poll found Biden leads Trump 51 percent to 46 percent among 1,001 registered voters (with a margin of error of 4 percentage points), and that Trump’s approval rating is at 45 percent, an all-time high in CNN polling.
Of course, national polls are essentially irrelevant when it comes to predicting who will win in November; it’s the results in the battleground states that will determine the victor.
For that reason, this survey is great news for President Trump, which is probably why CNN buried the poll on its website and made little mention of it on the air.
National Review’s Kyle Smith noted the interesting evaluation of the polling by CNN, and investigated further by visiting the outlet’s homepage.
He found that a post about the poll was not prominently featured on the website.
“Polls are expensive, news organizations tend to hype them breathlessly to generate headlines in rival media outlets, Wednesday was (obviously) a slow news day, and politics is one of CNN’s core topics,” Smith wrote.
“Yet CNN seemed oddly unenthused about its own poll. And the story to which the homepage linked doesn’t mention that Trump had never scored higher in a CNN poll.”
“The CNN story doesn’t even tell us what that figure is — seven points seems like a pretty big number — and downplays its own finding by noting, ‘Given the small sample size in that subset of voters, it is difficult to determine with certainty whether the movement is significant or a fluke of random sampling,’” Smith added.
Investing loads of money into polling, just to turn around and bury the findings while also filling the information with disclaimers, is a pretty good indication that those at CNN didn’t like what they saw.
Fox News reported that the poll also gained little traction from CNN’s reporters on the air.
“A review of transcripts found that only one CNN program on Wednesday mentioned the poll of registered voters that indicating 52 percent favor Trump, as opposed to 45 percent for Biden, in key battleground states,” Fox reported.
Citing the transcripts, Fox noted that CNN’s John King briefly mentioned the poll, pointing out that the numbers favored Biden with regard to his national lead.
The report added that King then downplayed the information from battleground states.
“But remember 2016. We pick presidents state by state. Look at the horse race in the 15 states that CNN designates as presidential battlegrounds. Take a peek. The president leads in those battleground states, 52 percent to 45 percent,” King said Wednesday during the 11 a.m. ET hour of “CNN Newsroom.”
“Be careful not to invest too much in any one poll, especially in the middle of a pandemic,” King warned.
Any mention of Trump’s lead in battleground states was shelved when the network began airing New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s daily media briefing.
This really equates to little more than a calculated deception from CNN, which isn’t surprising when looking at the organization’s recent behavior.
CNN has relentlessly attacked the president, and its own polling has found that those attacks have been been ineffective.
If the network valued the truth over its bottom line, which is destroying Trump, CNN would have been transparent about what its polling showed.
Rather than report that President Trump’s policies are resonating with voters, CNN went after its own poll as an apparent fluke.
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