By Mark Anderson
Stop the Presses News & Commentary
The eve of President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union speech to Congress, slated for the evening of Jan. 30, is a good time to examine the “Presidential Job-Approval Rating.”
This rating is reported regularly by mainstream media as if it reliably reflects political reality. But not only is the rating of questionable accuracy—Americans also should ask themselves if polling of any type from any organization, regardless of its trustworthiness, should so heavily influence our political life.
That is, do we really want virtual “crystal ball” assessments as well as predictions, typically based on questioning 1,000 to 1,500 respondents in a nation of 350 million people, to be afforded so much “weight” in our political discourse to begin with?
Despite polling uncertainties, we tend to define as basically accurate the many polls that survey the candidate preferences of often ill-informed voters who can, and often do, abruptly change their minds last-minute, having been influenced by constant TV reports about who's "ahead" before the election even begins, or soon after it has started.
The bottom line is that the constant airing of poll results skews the electoral outcome by discouraging some voters on the assumed “losing” side from ever casting ballots. Why vote when things sound like a "done deal"?
And consider the big media outlets and their questionable reports that disregard principled, fair analysis and incessantly sully the reputation of President Donald Trump to the near-breaking point. Then the same media turn around and cite numerous polls that purport to show Trump’s quite unpopular—as if their news reports have had no influence on polling results!
The vaunted Gallup Poll, founded at Princeton University by professor George Horace Gallup, is considered the most “official” polling organization tasked with “monitoring” public opinion on politics (and other matters), especially regarding rating the popularity of the sitting President of the United States (POTUS).
Yet, consider the big picture: Gallup has measured the popularity of just 14 presidents, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Donald Trump, while also trying to forecast presidential elections along the way.
But that historical timeline means that Gallup could not have surveyed the 31 pre-FDR presidents who served before Mr. Gallup gave up his journalism-teaching career and founded the American Institute of Public Opinion, or Gallup Poll, in 1935.
So, the next time you hear a news pundit repeat that President Trump is the most unpopular president “ever”—without mentioning that such a statement is only based on 14 of the 45 men who’ve served as POTUS, or about 34%—keep such numbers in mind.
For the record, according to Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport’s Jan 2, 2018 press release:
President Donald Trump's weekly job approval rose to 39% for the week ending Dec. 31, his highest weekly average since mid-July. It is difficult to determine a specific cause for last week's uptick, although it may reflect news of Trump's Friday, Dec. 22 signing of the new tax bill into law.
Trump on Dec. 29, 2017 got on Twitter as usual and tweeted:
While the Fake News loves to talk about my so-called low approval rating, 
The Washington Post shot back, saying Trump’s results came from a supposedly less reliable Rasmussen poll that’s allegedly biased toward Republicans.
As for making predictions, Gallup’s record is, well, spotty. Gallup’s 2012 final election survey predicted that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would nip Barack Obama 49% to 48%. But the final election results were 51.1% for Obama and 47.2% for Romney.
Notably, Romney, buoyed by such rosy-looking polling, confidently spent $25,000 for fireworks to launch over Boston Harbor for his victory bash. But it was not to be.
And because Gallup faithfully estimated that Hillary Clinton would beat Trump in November 2016, she had spent $7 million on fireworks that were to light the skies over New York City’s Hudson River. Poor gal.
Interestingly, American statistician Nate Silver, who correctly predicted the 2012 presidential election outcome in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, found that the Gallup Poll’s results that year were the least accurate of the 23 major polling firms that he analyzed.
Newport responded by stating that Gallup simply estimates the national popular vote rather than actually trying to predict the winner. He claimed the final poll was within the statistical error margin.
“If Nate Silver was the winner of last year's presidential election,” the New Republic wryly noted in 2013, “then Gallup was the loser. The long-time leader in polling [Gallup] consistently showed Mitt Romney ahead, sometimes by a decisive margin. And then . . . Obama won by 3.9 points—5 points off of Gallup’s final margin.”
A more legendary polling blunder happened when Gallup predicted that Republican New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey would defeat Democrat Harry S. Truman in the 1948 election, by five to fifteen percentage points, which led to the famous but erroneous Chicago Daily Tribune front-page headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
If mainstream media really want to properly analyze President Trump, pro and con, they could report, on the apparent “con” side, that:
• Three of Trump’s people attended the Bilderberg Group's highly secretive 2017 Virginia meeting along with two sitting U.S. senators, Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) This elitist global-networking group has existed since 1954 to foster world government from behind the scenes. So, the White House should be asked to explain what National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and defense adviser Nadia Schadlow were doing there.
• Or, conversely, the media could stop being so biased in favor of free trade and report that perhaps Trump’s skeptical view of NAFTA has a “pro” side.
But rather than digging deeper to produce real reporting, tempered by fairness and open-mindedness, the media dish out mostly corrosive and very little constructive criticism, while obsessing over polls. Even if the polls were accurate, should we assess the nation’s governance merely on the shifting sands of political opinion—when that opinion is largely molded by the maliciously misleading mainstream media?