No, Fox News, President Trump’s Approval Rating Did Not ‘Soar’ With Latinos

Jan 20, 2019
12:39 PM

Once again, Fox News is leading you to believe that Latino support for Donald Trump is increasing, even during the shutdown. In a piece titled “Poll: Trump Gains Approval From Latino Voters Since Gov’t Shutdown,” Fox states this: “Latinos are increasingly rallying for President Trump, according to data from a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. The poll notes that 50 percent of Latinos surveyed approve of the job Trump is doing, a 19-point increase from December of last year.”

Sounds pretty clear, right?

Not really, especially when one looks at the actual poll, which will confirm that all this “data” is based on 154 Latino respondents.

154.

What follows is an explanation about the 154 number.

Page 1 of the poll tells you how many people got surveyed. That would be 1,023 people.

Page 2 shows the demographic breakdown of the total number of people surveyed. Notice that under “Race,” (and yes, Latino is not a race), the poll states that 15% of respondents are Latino.

So, 15% of 1,023 people is 154 people.

154 people is not a national poll? We’ve done Twitter polls with more respondents. And considering that NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist cite “Latino” as a race, do you think their survey reflects a real cross-section of the Latino community?

And, even if the poll says that 50% of Latinos polled (that would be 72 people, by the way) approve of Trump’s performance right now, the level of approval varies. See this from the actual poll:

In that column, 29% of Latino respondents (that’s about 45 people) strongly approve of Trump, while 41% of Latino respondents strongly disapprove (that’s about 63 people).

And if Trump’s approval was high, how then does one explain this part of the poll, which asks is someone would vote for Trump in 2020:

As you can see, only 27% of Latinos (42 people) said they would vote for Trump, while 58% of Latinos (101 people) said they would not vote for him.

(We are also pretty sure that this poll was conducted in English only and didn’t even take into account any Spanish speakers.)

So spare us this “news” that Trump’s approval with Latinos is growing.

It’s not.

But we would be sure that if NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist actually conducted a Latino-centric poll with more than 1,000 respondents, the results would be very different. That’s for sure.

UPDATE, January 22, 2019, This in from NPR Politics reporter Tamara Keith: