Trump pollster: Media's impeachment polls undersample GOP, skew results

Mainstream media polls showing large majorities favoring a second impeachment of President Trump are skewed, according to Trump campaign pollster John McLaughlin.

"The media was skewing polls to lower the president's job approval and create the false impression Americans wanted to impeach President Trump," pollster John McLaughlin told "Just the News AM" television show.

Polling McLaughlin conducted for Trump's Save America PAC in 17 swing states Jan. 10-11 — following the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot — found that 77% of all voters think Congress should make its priority this week dealing with the coronavirus, while only 23% prefer impeaching President Trump.

McLaughlin said a CBS poll released Wednesday finding that 55% of Americans favored impeaching Trump this week was a "skewed poll" because its sample included only 28% Trump voters and 25% Republicans.

The CBS poll's sample, McLaughlin said, included "not 36 [percent Republicans], which the media polls had on Election Day this year, but they had 25% — that's an 11 point partisan skew reducing the Republican vote," McLaughlin said, noting that Trump won nearly 47% of the national vote.

"They do this with a straight face, and they carry the headlines, and it wasn't just them," said McLaughlin. "You had The Economist with skewed polls, you had Politico's Morning Consult with skewed polls, they're underpolling Trump voters, and they're underpolling Republicans so that they can make it seem like it was politically popular to impeach the president. And the voters don't want this, they want to deal with real problems, they want to move on." 

Calling the Politico Morning Consult poll "terribly skewed to give a false impression voters want impeachment," McLaughlin noted its sample included 50% Biden voters but only 36% Trump voters, even though Trump received 47% of the popular vote, an 11 point skew.

McLaughlin noted that 49% of those in the Consult poll are Democrats/lean Democrat to 35% Republican/lean Republican, yet the media exit polls on Election Day 2020 were: 37% Democrat to 36% Republican, a 12-point Democrat skew.

"The President has less than a week to serve in office, and he's focused on a peaceful and orderly transition and making sure there's no violence and there's no political partisanship and polarization, and [the biased polls] just keep coming in," said the pollster. "The media helps them and, this is just me, but certainly the mainstream media and Big Tech are censoring our point of views, and then they're putting out skewed polls to further their point of view."

Neither Politico nor CBS News responded to request for comment from Just the News.

The skewed impeachment polls echo the skewed 2020 presidential election polling, according to McLaughlin. "The big disconnect is there was a series of these media polls who were wrong during the year, were predicting a Biden landslide and a Blue Wave," he said.

In its final 2020 election polling, Morning Consult showed Joe Biden with an 8-point lead over Trump, but the actual margin was just 4.5%. Other media outlets suggested an even wider margin separating the candidates.  

Prior to the November election, Brexit architect Nigel Farage suggested to Just the News that mainstream media polls showing president-elect Joe Biden with a far wider lead than actually materialized were failing to accurately gauge support for Trump as a means to suppress Trump voter turnout.