I’m not sure who Fox News subcontracts to do their polling, but they may want to seek out another company.
Over the past year or so, their polls have become one of the consistent bright spots for Democrats. This leads to lots of chortling about how “even Fox News” is showing bad news for Republicans, as if their polls previously favored Republicans (they really didn’t). The problem is that the results they’ve been putting out are so far removed from every other pollster that they’ve established an absolutely massive house effect in favor of Democrats.
So while blue-checkmarks on Twitter love to suddenly push Fox News polls, the fact is that they’ve become useless outliers. Take their latest survey as an example.
That poll shows that by a +19 point margin that Americans want Donald Trump removed. The problem? Every other recent poll shows fairly large majorities of Americans not wanting to remove Trump. In fact, you have to go back to mid-January to find another poll that even puts it at +2, much less +19.
How’d they get that result? One of the issues is that the sample came out to 48% Democrat, which is a laughable number given that partisan identification is on a downward trend. In no other survey do 48% of Americans identify as Democrats. Yet, Fox managed to find that, along with only about half the total number of Republicans. That’s how you end up with a result so wildly out of the average. In fact, the only reason that average is nearly even at “No” +0.6% is because Fox News’ result is skewing things so heavily.
When you consistently get a result that’s not even in the same ballpark as everyone else, that should be a tip-off that something is wrong. But Fox News appears to be content with p pumping out their surveys without asking why things are so out of whack. They do make good fodder for Chris Wallace and the like I suppose.
Remember this is the next time someone says “har har even Fox News doesn’t show Republicans doing well.” That’s actually the expectation at this point until they look into their methodology.