Sean Hannity Rails Against His Own Network's Polls: 'Really Wrong'
Fox News host Sean Hannity has added his voice to those attacking recent Fox News polling that showed President Donald Trump on the wrong end of public opinion.
On Sunday, Fox News released a poll that showed Trump unable to defeat any top Democratic presidential candidate.
Former Vice President Joe Biden had the largest margin over Trump of any candidate, 51 percent to 39 percent. The poll showed that other top Democrats either beat or tied Trump. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont would beat Trump 49 percent to 41 percent, according to the poll, Sen. Elizabeth Warren would defeat Trump 46 percent to 41 percent, the poll found.
The poll also found that in a 2016 rematch, Hillary Clinton had 43 percent support against Trump’s 41 percent. Trump fared best against South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, tying him at 41 percent.
Hannity poked holes in those findings during his Monday radio show, according to an excerpt from the show posted by the Washington Examiner.
Hannity noted that the “New York Times/Siena College poll shows Trump in a dead heat in battleground states, matched up against the three leading Democratic candidates: Biden, Sanders and Warren.”
“I don’t know what’s up with the Fox poll. I look at their poll, I’m like, ‘OK, you’re sampling — oversampling Democrats by eight points.’ I’m like — some outside company they hire — I’m like, ‘OK, they need new methodology because it’s really wrong,’” Hannity said.
Hannity’s oversampling claim works like this: The most recent poll had a breakdown of 49 percent Democrats and 41 percent Republicans. Hannity said the poll was skewed because it gave Democrats a larger share in the poll than they are in real life, meaning that the poll showed greater opposition to Trump than a true sample of Americans would have done.
The exact figures on party preference produce slightly different numbers, depending on who does the survey and when the survey is taken.
A Gallup poll, however, from October found that the breakdown of the electorate is 29 percent Democrats, 26 percent Republicans and 43 percent independents. Although that has fluctuated over time, Gallup found that since 2016, the highest percentage it recorded of Americans who said they were Democrats was in October 2018 when the share of Democrats came in at 35 percent, while Republicans were at 29 percent.
Fox has been accused of being Democrat-heavy in its polling before. In mid-October, it published a poll saying a majority of Americans supported impeaching the president.
In that survey, conducted by Braun Research, 48 percent of respondents were Democrats, according to the New York Post, which did its own analysis of the poll.
Using Gallup figures from September to determine the proportions of Democrats and Republicans in its analysis, the Post reported that a poll mirroring the actual balance of Republicans and Democrats would have found that 44.9 percent of respondents favored impeachment and 44.4 percent were against it.
Trump has also vented his displeasure at Fox, along with other media polls.
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
On Saturday, Trump was asked by reporters about polls showing support for impeachment.
“Well, you’re reading the wrong polls. You’re reading the wrong polls.” Trump said, according to a White House media pool report.
“I have the real polls. The CNN polls are fake. The Fox polls have always been lousy. I tell them they ought to get themselves a new pollster,” Trump said.
“People don’t want anything to do with impeachment. It’s a phony scam. It’s a hoax.”
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