Monday on his nationally syndicated radio program, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh ripped a poll from The Washington Post and ABC News that gave President Donald Trump a 36 percent approval rating and a 48 percent disapproval rating.
Limbaugh took issue with the poll for sampling 12 percent more Democrats than Republicans and noted that polling data had shown Trump losing in a landslide to Hillary Clinton last November.
Partial transcript as follows (courtesy of RushLimbaugh.com):
You will when I tell you why this ABC poll is so damned distorted. You know what this polling stuff is doing?
This misrepresentation… They take and put together a faulty sample that oversamples Democrats. This ABC/Washington Post poll that has Trump’s approval number plummeting? Do you know what the plus Democrat number is? It’s 12%! There was a plus-12% additional Democrats sampled in this poll. Well, hell’s bells! And if you look elsewhere, you find that barely 9% of Trump’s base is having some problems with him. He’s having practically no falloff at all, which is frustrating. But here’s the thing about these polls. Look at what polls are doing to Democrats and the left.
They think they’re winning everything because of the polls. Hillary was gonna win in a landslide because of the polls. Trump was barely gonna show up because of the polls. Now there are polls saying that Trump’s popularity is vanishing, and he’s quickly becoming a nonentity. But it isn’t true! So the media believe their own polls and conduct business accordingly. Their deranged audience, the lunatics on the left, believe the polls. They’re losing everywhere except in the polls, and so they think they’re winning and that everything else is fraudulent.
And it’s a disservice that the pollsters are doing to their own people, and it’s large… I think the polls have a major role in creating some of the discord that exists. Not fully. I mean, there are many elements to this. But if you’re a deranged lunatic leftist and you’re part of the Democrat base — and you’re a victim or you’re offended and you’re constantly angry — and you see poll after poll after poll that shows a majority of American people agree with you, and yet everywhere in real life you’re losing, what would you do?
When I first got a sample of this, I thought of the exit polls in 2004. At five p.m., they had John Kerry winning the presidency, and of course, he didn’t. He lost it, and he lost it sizably, and leftists at that time thought that the exit polls were accurate and that the real vote count had been tampered with. The exit polls were what? “Kerry won! Did you see?” Well, this is just a microcosm of what’s been happening since, and it’s creating… I mean, they’re already off balance and off kilter, and this just contributes to it even more.
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