Donald Trump Touts Highest Favorability Ratings For GOP In 7 Years, Misstates Party’s Advantage Over Democrats
Are Americans’ attitudes on the midterm elections shifting to favor Republicans? President Donald Trump seems to believe so, tweeting on Tuesday that Americans favored his Republican Party over Democrats in a new poll.
Yet additional polling numbers seem to contradict the president, and Trump himself sent out the wrong numbers in his social media post.
Early Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump sent a tweet that touted new polling data from Gallup showing that Republicans had the highest favorability ratings they’ve received from that outfit over the past seven years.
In the same tweet, however, Trump seemed to have gotten his numbers mixed up, wrongly stating that the GOP’s favorability ratings were three percentage points higher than what the Democratic Party received in the same poll.
“Republican Party Favorability is the highest it has been in 7 years – 3 points higher than Democrats!” Trump wrote.
As a report from the Washington Post points out, the difference in ratings is just one point, well within the poll’s margin of error, which was +/- 4 percent.
Even with the mistake made by Trump in his tweet, the finding from the poll seems to be good news for the Republican Party, which is facing the possibility of a “blue wave” of Democratic Party opposition in this year’s midterm election races, per previous reporting from Inquisitr. Polls are snapshots in time, however, and it’s not clear whether this trend will hold up going into the rest of the election season.
Favorability doesn’t necessarily translate into voter preferences either, and other polls have demonstrated that Democrats have a sizable advantage on “generic ballot” questions. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll from last week, for example, demonstrated that Democrats had a 12-point lead over Republicans just a month-and-a-half before the general election.
Even a poll from the Trump-preferred Fox News demonstrated that Democrats had better standing weeks ahead of the election, giving the party a seven-point advantage over Republicans in a head-to-head generic matchup.
Many on social media were quick to point out Trump’s errant tweet, with some suggesting that his mistake was more purposeful than accidental.
https://twitter.com/MaerRoshan/status/1044590193150291968
There is no indication that Trump’s tweet was meant to be deceptive, but most analysts agree that Democrats have a better advantage heading toward November than does Trump’s GOP. At current press time, the polling site FiveThirtyEight.com, for instance, projects a four-in-five chance that Democrats will win the House of Representatives. For Republicans, that chance is less than one-in-five.
