On Friday, National Press Secretary for the Trump 2020 campaign Hogan Gidley appeared on “Fox & Friends” to discuss the election. During the segment, Gidley said “most of those are fake,” seemingly in reference to Fox News polls, and co-host Brian Kilmeade pushed back.
Gidley first spoke about the cancellation of the Republican National Convention events that were previously slated to take place in Jacksonville, Florida, then he briefly mentioned the polls.
“You touched on some polls – most of those are fake, I’ll be honest. They oversample Democrats,” the press secretary said.
Gidley proceeded to mock the apparent enthusiasm gap between President Trump and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. He claimed that “across our social media platforms,” there have been “more than 1.1 billion views … for Donald Trump,” while Biden allegedly struggled to get anyone to watch his Q&A.
“The fact is the enthusiasm, the excitement is all on our side, and we know this. Our supporters will stand through rain, sleet, snow, hail, and crawl across broken glass to vote for Donald Trump,” Gidley said. “Joe Biden’s supporters won’t even click on a link to watch him do a Q&A. It’s absolutely embarrassing. We have the momentum.”
At this point, Kilmeade jumped in, saying: “I know the people that do the polls, they’re not, they don’t do a fake, they do a really good job. They might not be accurate in the end, I don’t know, but they do a great job.”
“Doesn’t accuracy … I know the people are great, but doesn’t the accuracy determine how great it is?” Gidley replied.
Kilmeade shot back: “I’m not saying they’re Nostradamus, but I’m just saying they’re math – and they’re professional, so just don’t call the Fox News pollsters fake.”
“Well, the methodology’s flawed at the very least, how’s that?” Gidley stated.
As co-host Steve Doocy noted that President Trump has made the same argument about the alleged under-sampling of Republicans in the polls, Kilmeade appeared to quietly say, “In your opinion,” seemingly in response to Gidley’s last remark.
Let’s examine one example of a Fox News poll that was mentioned by Kilmeade.
In the latest Fox News poll for Pennsylvania, which was conducted July 18-20, the sampling was as follows: 48% Democrat, 40% Republican, 12% Independent/Other.
According to the Pennsylvania Department of State (DOS) website, as of June 2020, there were 4,092,693 registered Democrats in the state compared to 3,290,944 registered Republicans. Broken down by percentage, registered Democrats represent 47.6% of voters in the state, and registered Republicans represent 38.3% of voters.
14.1% identified with “other parties.”
Given these numbers, and leaving out voting pattern differences such as voter enthusiasm, the Fox poll for the state of Pennsylvania actually seems to over-represent Republicans.
However, Pennsylvania primary results as reported by Politico do show that for the June 2 primary, President Trump, despite facing no real challengers, pulled in approximately 934,524 votes. Joe Biden pulled in 914,904 votes compared to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 208,456 votes.
These numbers show that while 28.4% of registered Democrats in the state voted in the June 2 primary, 30.5% of registered Republicans voted even though Trump was a forgone conclusion.
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