With a significant chunk of their money – not two percent – coming from taxpayers, why must PBS and NPR pay for their own polling? They can hardly argue this is something the commercial networks don’t do.
Then, on top of that, they have manipulated the polls for a liberal political agenda. When Trump started to go "above water" in his approval rating among Latinos, they shifted to the categories of "White" and "Non-White."
If you look back to NPR’s first public Presidential Approval poll of President Trump’s administration fielded June 21-25, 2017, you can see they break out his approval by demographics, isolating the racial category “Latinos,” as well as “African Americans.”
At the time of this survey, only 24 percent of Latinos approved of the job President Trump was doing, while 62 percent disapproved. This was better than African Americans, at eight percent approval and 82 percent disapproval.
Every poll that they conducted, about every other month, continued to break out job approval by their racial categories. By September 2018, Trump had made real progress: 43 percent of Latinos approved, and 49 percent disapproved.
Fast forward to January 2019, when the survey found his first net positive approval rating among the Latino demographic: 50 percent approval, 46 percent disapproval.
But NPR reported it as another bad poll for Trump, under the headline "Poll: Trump Approval Down, Slips With Base." NPR political director Domenic Montanaro touted the categories where Trump was down:
-- Down significantly among suburban men, a net-positive approval rating of 51-to-39 percent to a net-negative of 42 percent approve, 48 percent disapprove. That's a net change of down 18 percentage points.
-- Down a net of 13 points among white evangelicals, from 73-to-17 percent approve to 66-to-23 percent approve.
-- Down a net of 10 points among Republicans, from 90-to-7 percent approve to 83-to-10 percent.
By their next poll in March 2019, they changed the categories….to simply White and Non-White, to blur the Latinos and African Americans together, with 27 percent approving and 64 percent disapproving. They preferred to create the worst number for Trump with minorities.
And THAT is how you erase Trump's success with Latinos even though he's been tough on immigration.
In their latest February poll, the taxpayer-subsidized Marist poll is now separated into racial categories of White, African American, and "Other." The current "Other" number is 36 percent approval, 55 percent disapproval....low enough to keep a public-broadcasting "news" junkie satisfied.
