Contrary to the knee-jerk reactions of an unfortunately growing constituency of what I would have liked to think were friends of mine who immediately paint me as some sort of right-wing lunatic gone mad, I really don’t like the current leader of what at least for now is the free world. For perhaps the 100th time, apropos considering today marks 100 days of our second self-induced sentencing, I did not vote for the man and, no, it’s not a binary choice world. So please don’t try to pin our current economic woes or our burdgeoning constitutional crisis on me.
So when the news cycle yesterday that began the “celebration” of those 100 days was dotted with stories like this from THE WEEK’s Justin Klawans, I gave it what I considered to be an obligatory level of acknowledgement–pretty much the level of detail that Klawans did:
President Donald Trump has the lowest 100-day job approval rating of any president in the past 80 years, at 39%, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll. The results of an NBC News poll also released Sunday put his approvalThe approval rating drops “come as Trump falls short of majority support on any specific policy issues tested,” said NBC. A “flurry of polls in recent days” reveal one overriding theme, said Bloomberg: “Voters perceive Trump to be falling short on his core campaign promise to strengthen the economy.” rating at 45%. A CNN/SSRS poll put it at 41%, the lowest “dating back at least to Dwight Eisenhower — including Trump’s own first term,” CNN said.
DEADLINE’s hard-working Ted Johnson provided yet another brand name barometer, along with the wholly predictable reaction of its subject to all of them:
The latest New York Times-Siena College poll showed 54% disapprove of Trump’s job performance, and 42% approve. According to the Times daily average of polls, his approval rating is at 44%, compared to 52% in January.
The president wrote on Truth Social, “These people should be investigated for ELECTION FRAUD, and add in the FoxNews Pollster while you’re at it. They are Negative Criminals who apologize to their subscribers and readers after I WIN ELECTIONS BIG, much bigger than their polls showed I would win, loose a lot of credibility, and then go on cheating and lying for the next cycle, only worse. They suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, and there is nothing that anyone, or anything, can do about it.”
The actual X-eet which regurgitated his “truth” is downright hilarious, if for no other reason than after a decade of this sort of behavior typically occurring in the middle of the night while farts and fecal matter filled the gold-gilded storage closet that serves as his bathroom one would think he would have gotten enough autocorrect prompts to actually learn to spell “lose” with just one o. But I suppose when you’re out making 200 tariff deals in a world with only 195 countries, such trivial details shouldn’t matter.
I generally ignore his tantrums, much like a parent with a particularly petulant child is advised to do. But when they involve the accuracy of polls, since that’s a subject I’m more than a little astute on, I do give it a tad more attention.
So I dug into the first graf where he invoked the name John McLaughlin. My own knee-jerk reaction was that somehow he was talking about the guy who presided over the weekly PBS and NBC O & O panel show that was popular enough to have merited SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE parody. Nope, that one left this mortal coil nine years ago, just as his first campaign was mushrooming. This one, per his company’s website, at least appears to be auspiced enough to weigh in:
John McLaughlin has worked professionally as a strategic consultant and pollster for over 35 years. During this time he has earned a reputation for helping some of America’s most successful corporations and winning some of the toughest elections in the nation… His political clients have included former Presidential candidates Steve Forbes and Fred Thompson, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, former Georgia Governor Nathan Deal and 22 current and former U.S. Senators and 16 current Republican members of Congress. Internationally, John has done work in Israel for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, The Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada and he advised Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in his 2018 landslide re-election.
So when the Ranter-in-Chief invoked this observation, I actually had to give it some credence:
Great Pollster John McLaughlin, one of the most highly respected in the industry, has just stated that The Failing New York Times Poll, and the ABC/Washington Post Poll, about a person named DONALD J. TRUMP, ME, are FAKE POLLS FROM FAKE NEWS ORGANIZATIONS. The New York Times has only 37% Trump 2024 voters, and the ABC/Washington Post Poll has only 34% Trump Voters, unheard of numbers unless looking for a negative result, which they are.
I hate to tell you all, but he actually has a point. Regular readers know I’m particularly critical about polls in general. A properly constructed sample should come as close to reflecting the actual proportions of how their respondents are reflected in such large sample results as Nielsen ratings and national elections. Trump had 49.7 per cent of the popular vote in 2024. Were I designing an objective survey that would focused on measuring him, I would have insisted that it should have roughly that proportion of voters rather than merely weighting it by party affiliation or, worse yet, not control for it at all. And if that’s what McLaughlin pointed out to his client and his more mature advisers, he would be 100 per cent justified in calling it into question.
This McLaughlin is a paid professional advising some very difficult people who pay his salary. I’ve been in the very same shoes myself. I’ve never answered into a sitting U.S. president, but I did report into someone who slept in the Lincoln Bedroom a few times. Haim Saban would hold weekly strategy sessions that I steered a group of disbelieving executives–none more so than him–through whenever the FOX Kids ratings were released. I would often patiently have to explain that when the share of boys 6-11 that were the key sales demographic would sometimes fluctuate by as many as 10-15 share points between any two given weeks, it was more of an issue with sample size and statistically acceptable variance than any dramatic response to our brilliant scheduling or a well-promoted original episode. When you sliced and diced the already insufficient Nielsen sample as thin as that sliver of a demographic represented, with our modest ratings those shifts were often the result of one or two sample households. When Saban would thunder “how the f–k could this happen?!?!”, I would truthfully respond “I guess the kids who watched last week were in timeout”.
So maybe if the Great Pollster had gone through the math for some of the folks who picked up on his findings who had the capacity to understand simple math, he might have been able to do what I was able to do in my own overnight rant fueled by some stomach-churning food:
Let’s take the New York Times poll as an example, since our dear prexy seems to get more red-faced about that one than many. With a sample size of 913, that would suggest that 338 respondents (37%) were Trump voters. That also means that 384 respondents (42%) currently see him favorably. Means that about 5 per cent of the sample (46 respondents) didn’t vote for him yet still don’t think he sucks.
Suppose the sample was constructed to reflect the 2024 vote proportion. That would mean that 454 out of those 913 would be Trump voters–a net gain of 116 respondents. Let’s say that the same proportion of those 116 that actually voted for him would now see him favorably. That would add 58 respondents to that 384 mumber, bringing it to 442. That would bring his approval to 48.4%–essentially within statistical shouting distance of where he was at the outset of all of this.
It’s still well below the 100-day levels of his 21st century predecessors–yes, even Sleepy Joe. He’s certainly not trending upwards. It still belies that there’s somehow a mandate for him to do whatever his corroded heart desires. But it is also a truer representation of what is actually going on than what the clickbaiters out there have glommed onto.
In more private moments with Saban, I would walk him through similar exercises and reality checks. Eventually he caught on. He even would urge the more emotional and defensive executives who would still get up in arms to ask questions about how much our shifts really meant in the big picture. He ultimately fired our president and shortly after that sold the network off (by that time, I had bailed that Titanic myself.). I’m not saying the insights I provided were necessarily the ingredients that led to his giving up the ghost. But they certainly didn’t hurt.
I’m confident that after dealing with a difficult politically driven billionaire I could provide similar counsel to what McLaughlin is providing, not to mention a better narrative than either he or his client are. It’s not fake news, ya dinks. It’s just sub-par research.
Maybe if you all took that approach rather than shriek almost as incoherently as does that blind squirrel in the Oval Office, you might have a better chance at getting what you are praying for.
Until next time…