THE DAILY SIGNAL: Mainstream media would have you believe that Trump’s first 100 days were a failure-despite securing the border and strong economic gains. Victor Davis Hanson breaks down the polling regarding Donald Trump’s early 2025 presidency on today’s edition of Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words, and asks the question: Were pollsters reflecting public opinion, or manipulating it?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: This is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We’ve touched on polls before but I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite as egregious in pollsters’ bias as recently when they apparently or supposedly or purportedly surveyed the first hundred days of Donald Trump and the public reaction. Almost immediately headlines blared, worst first hundred days in history. Trump drops from 52 to 41, 42. Everybody was confounded because the economic news was pretty good. Job growth was just spectacular, over 170,000 jobs. Inflation was down. Energy prices were down. Corporate profits were up. There was a movement on the trade question. There was no bad news except the controversy and chaos of a counter-revolution. So what were the pollsters trying to tell us or were they trying to manipulate? And I think it’s the latter. Larry Kudlow, for example, the former Fox business, I think he still is at Fox, he pointed out that when he examined the New York Times and the Washington Post polls, they were deliberately not counting people who surveyed that they were Trump voters in 2024. That was half the country. They were only polling about a third. Think of that, a third of the people that said they voted for Trump, they polled. Not half. So of course their results were going to be disputed or suspect. But here’s another thing. There were analyses after each of the 2016, the 2020, and the 2024 elections about the accuracy of polls post-facto of the election. And we learned that they were way off in 2016. They said they had learned their lessons. They were way off in 2020. They said they learned their lesson. And they were way off in 2024. And why are they way off? Because liberal pollsters, and that’s the majority of people who do these surveys, believe that if they create artificial leads for their Democratic candidates, it creates greater fundraising and momentum. Kind of the herd mentality. Oh, Trump is down by six. I don’t want to vote for him. Then he won’t win. That’s the type of thing that they want to create. I’ll give you one example. The most egregious of all these polls was the NPR-PBS-Marist poll. They have Donald Trump just very unpopular after 100 days. Very unpopular. This is the now defunded Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That umbrella organization from which this poll was funded and conducted. Do you remember that poll? It was the one poll that came out the night before the 2024 election. They said that Kamala Harris would win by four points. And they said it was beyond the margin of error. And one of the pollsters said it’s her race to lose. She lost by a point and a half. They were five and a half points. Did they apologize? No. Here they are again. And David Ploof, one of the directors of the Harris campaign, just recently came out and said, well, we had all these inside polls we never disclosed. But not one of them, not one of them had Harris ever ahead of Trump. Inside polls don’t lie because you pay somebody to tell you the truth. Nothing will get you fired and lose income quicker than to lie about a poll so that your candidate will be happy and rely on your false information. People don’t pay for that kind of stuff. So in other words, they knew the whole time, the Harris campaign, that 15 of those 20 polls, 19 polls that all had Harris winning the election, they were all false. Of course they never said anything. And so here’s my point. If you look at the polls that were the most accurate, Mark Pym was very accurate. He’s a Democratic pollster. But especially the Rasmussen poll and the Insider Advantage and the Trafalgar poll, they joined together and they had a 100-day survey. Rasmussen, each day of the 100-day period, he’s issued a poll. And guess what? They have Trump ahead by anywhere from two to three points after 100 days. And they were the most accurate. And yet, what do these news outlets say? That Trump, it’s a disaster, that he’s polling. No, he’s polling very well. Things are going very well because the pollsters that indicate that people support him are the only pollsters that have any reputation after this decade-long polling disaster in which their prejudices, their biases, and their hatred of Donald Trump affected their results and they were effectively in league with the Democratic candidate to create momentum rather than adhere to a spirit of professionalism and honor. Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.

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