On Sunday’s Meet the Press, moderator Chuck Todd offered a brief report on the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls showing President Trump’s approval rating remaining virtually unchanged despite a week of news focused on the conviction of Paul Manafort and guilty pleas from Michael Cohen. However, Todd revealed that the network was so skeptical of the results that it actually conducted a second survey to verify the numbers.
“So what effect did Michael Cohen’s guilty plea and Paul Manafort’s convictions have on President Trump’s approval rating?,” Todd rhetorically asked. He then disappointedly gave the answer: “Well, we have brand new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll numbers, and the answer so far seems to be no.”
The host explained: “We actually have two polls. The first one was taken last Saturday through Wednesday, mostly before the news broke. There, the President’s job approval rating hit an all-time high in our poll, 46%. 51% disapproving.”
Todd claimed that another poll was taken to satisfy the skepticism of NBC viewers, rather than dismayed journalists: “Then we took a second poll, entirely after the news broke, from Wednesday through yesterday, because we knew some of you might be skeptical of the results. Well, the results, they barely changed. Margin of error differences. 44% approve. 52% disapprove.”
The poll was conducted jointly by Republican pollster McInturff and Democratic pollster Peter Hart. Todd cited Hart issuing a warning to his fellow Democrats: “For the 2018 Democratic strategy, the Manafort and Cohen convictions represent a fool’s gold opportunity, rather than a silver bullet solution.” In a write-up of the poll for NBCNews.com, Hart was amazed by Trump’s “remarkably stable” support.
After delivering bad news to the left, Todd wrapped up the segment by trying to bolster liberal electoral hopes:
By the way, in our poll, Democrats still hold a very big lead for control of Congress, eight points now, 50 to 42. It’s an improvement for Democrats from July, when they had a six point lead, 49-43. So that’s right, the President strengthened and congressional Democrats strengthened.
On Monday morning, while filling in for Stephanie Ruhle in the 9:00 a.m. ET hour, anchor Chris Jansing echoed Todd’s fretting over the poll results:
And a lot of people thought after the horrible, terrible, very bad week the President had, with more guilty pleas from – well a guilty plea and a conviction for a couple of members of his – former members of his inner circle, he might take a big hit, but he hasn’t. The approval rating, depending on where you look at, it’s 46 or 44%. But basically unchanged from where it was.
One of her guests, PBS NewsHour White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor confessed: “I’m not surprised by it because the day that both of these guilty – the news of all of this guiltiness, I should say, broke, I was at a rally that the President had in West Virginia....And people simply did not care.”
Moments later, Jansing highlighted another important finding in the poll that Todd forgot to mention:
And one last number that was really interesting, Ron Insana, is which party would do a better job at handling the economy? A 14-point advantage for the Republicans [Republicans 43%, Democrats 29%]. We have never seen that big a lead in this question in the poll’s history. I wonder if that’s giving them some hope for what might happen in November.
Insana, a CNBC contributor, acknowledged: “Well, Chris, the stock market’s at all-time highs, you know, the S&P 500 is there. We see a host of major averages that are doing well. The economy is effectively firing on all cylinders.”
Despite the coverage on Meet the Press and MSNBC, Sunday’s NBC Nightly News and Monday’s Today show both ignored the new poll numbers.
Here is a full transcript of Todd’s coverage on the August 26 Meet the Press:
11:16 AM ET
CHUCK TODD: Welcome back. So what effect did Michael Cohen’s guilty plea and Paul Manafort’s convictions have on President Trump’s approval rating? The two stories have many asking whether this was more than even President Trump’s supporters could bear. Well, we have brand new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll numbers, and the answer so far seems to be no.
We actually have two polls. The first one was taken last Saturday through Wednesday, mostly before the news broke. There, the President’s job approval rating hit an all-time high in our poll, 46%. 51% disapproving. That’s due entirely, by the way, to the hardening of support from the President’s base. He’s now getting over 90% approval from Republicans.
Then we took a second poll, entirely after the news broke, from Wednesday through yesterday, because we knew some of you might be skeptical of the results. Well, the results, they barely changed. Margin of error differences. 44% approve. 52% disapprove. And trust me, inside the numbers, not much there.
As one of our pollsters Peter Hart put it, “For the 2018 Democratic strategy, the Manafort and Cohen convictions represent a fool’s gold opportunity, rather than a silver bullet solution.”
By the way, in our poll, Democrats still hold a very big lead for control of Congress, eight points now, 50 to 42. It’s an improvement for Democrats from July, when they had a six point lead, 49-43. So that’s right, the President strengthened and congressional Democrats strengthened. Still, President Trump’s strength in the face of a nightmare news week demonstrates that his voters remain far more loyal than his close associates do, some of whom turned on him this week.
