Suspicious: Trump Approval Rating

This week, Rasmussen Reports released a poll showing that Trump’s approval rating had reached 51 percent in the last few days of his presidency. Considering that he had just been impeached for the second time (the only president to have done so), some believe that this is a surprising result. This poll has since been written about on several websites.

Misbar’s investigation found that Rasmussen Reports is a controversial source of information. During the 2018 midterms, they predicted that Republicans would take the house by about one point. Democrats actually won the house by 8.6 percent. Rasmussen rates as a “C+” in terms of credibility on FiveThirtyEight’s poll rating.

Other polls rank Trump as having between a 41 percent approval rating and a 29 percent approval rating in the last few days of his presidency.

Why the discrepancy? Rasmussen Reports takes their data from telephone calls and emails. The main issue is that they don’t call cellphones. Younger and less wealthy people are more likely to have cellphone-only households, and their political views tend to lean left. Older and wealthier households, who are more likely to identify as conservative, have a much higher rate of landline usage. Further, people living in rural areas, who tend to skew conservative, are more likely to be home to answer polls.