The Hill is at it again with a misleading tweet about a recent poll of Iowa voters.
The tweet, sent Sunday morning, reads, “NEW POLL: 40 percent of Iowa voters say Trump should be removed from office.” Sounds bad right? He couldn’t possibly win Iowa in November with numbers like that, right?
Except the tweet leaves out important information found in the article (it’s pure clickbait), which shows 48% of voters think President Donald Trump should not be removed from office. Yet The Hill’s tweet seeks to make things look bad for Trump.
The article itself is not so biased, titled, “Iowa voters split on Trump impeachment, poll shows.” There was more to the poll, but the majority of it was not bad news for Trump. From the article:
The survey, released late Saturday, found that 45 percent of registered Iowa voters disapprove of the House impeachment of Trump, while 43 percent support it. The opinions divide strongly along partisan lines, with 87 percent of Democrats supporting impeachment and 90 percent of Republican respondents opposing it.
Forty-eight percent of independent respondents said they disapproved the House’s move to impeach Trump while 39 percent said they approved it.
The independents here are the most important tell of how people are actually feeling, since Democrats are going to Democrat and Republicans are going to Republican. The poll also found that “Seventy-two percent of Iowa voters said in the new poll that it is ‘not OK’ for a presidential candidate to try to gain an advantage over a political rival by seeking help from foreign nations.” A majority across all parties felt this way, with Republicans holding the smallest percentage majority (59%). This is a clear reference to the narrative surrounding Trump’s phone call and subsequent actions with Ukraine. If the same scenario took place under a Democrat president, the Republican and Democrat majorities found in this poll would likely be switched. But the question was misleading on its face as it distorted the facts surrounding the Ukraine phone call. Democrats in the House presented no evidence to suggest Trump tried “to gain an advantage over a political rival by seeking help from foreign nations.” He asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into one aspect of the origins of the false narrative that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. Right after that, Trump also mentioned Hunter Biden, son of former Vice President Joe Biden, and who had some shady deals in Ukraine. Biden even bragged about withholding aide from Ukraine (while he was vice president) in order to get a prosecutor in the country fired. That prosecutor (corrupt as he was) also just so happened to be looking into the company that had been paying Hunter Biden. Despite this on-camera admission from Biden, Trump is the one alleged to have done something wrong.
There were two bad numbers for Trump in the poll. Fifty-one percent of Iowa independents said in the survey that Trump should be removed from office. That’s definitely a bad number, as they could swing the state for Democrats. The other unfavorable number for Trump was that just 34% of Iowa voters said they would “definitely vote to reelect Trump if the election were held today” while 44% said they “would definitely vote for someone else.”
As The Hill noted, Trump won Iowa in 2016 by 9 points — the largest margin for a Republican since Ronald Reagan won the state in 1980. Polls for the state back in 2016 showed steady movement toward Trump over the last few months of the election. Even then, none predicted Trump would win by a margin of 9 points (the closest was a Monmouth poll in mid-September which had Trump leading by 8 points).
The Hill’s tweet wouldn’t be so bad if the outlet didn’t have such a clear agenda against Trump. A scroll through its recent tweets found that it always highlights poll numbers that look bad for Trump — but at least those poll numbers were the majority. In this case, they cherry-picked a result that suggested the opposite of what the poll actually found.