Fox & Friends Blatantly Distorts Gallup Poll To Inflate GOP Contenders' Popularity

Written by Chelsea Rudman

Published

This morning, Fox & Friends yet again showed off their fondness for inverting and distorting poll results to portray an alternate reality. During a segment with Fox News contributor Dick Morris, the co-hosts mentioned a recent USA Today/Gallup poll concerning voters' opinions on President Obama and several potential GOP contenders. Here's how Fox & Friends portrayed the results of that poll:

BRIAN KILMEADE (co-host): This is a poll that is now out about people that would -- that would might consider -- or not -- definitely not consider voting for Donald Trump. Now if you look at Romney, definitely might consider voting for, 69 percent. When it goes down for Donald Trump, 52 percent. But not voting is the most disturbing for Trump -- 46 percent definitely not voting for him. Those numbers much lower for Romney, Huckabee and Palin.

This graphic aired on screen while Kilmeade was speaking:

So according to Fox, this poll found that at least half of voters “definitely” or “might” consider voting for Romney, Huckabee, Palin, and Trump.

That is not what the poll found. Here are the actual results, as shown by a graphic in the USA Today article on the results:

USA Today graphic

As Gallup points out in their poll release, the news here is that “more than 6 in 10 registered voters nationwide say they would definitely not vote for Donald Trump or Sarah Palin for president in 2012.”

Where did Fox get their numbers? Scroll down and you'll see that those are the results for registered Republican respondents only:

Gallup GOP results

Morris did say during the Fox & Friends segment, "[Trump's] certainly a polarizing figure ... He expands the size of the electorate. He brings new people into it. Sometimes if you're just polling the usual Republican primary voters, you'll get a jaundiced impression of that. Also, you know, in a 15 way field ... it only matters how many people vote for you, not how many vote against you."

But Morris isn't specifying that the results Kilmeade just brought up are only for Republican voters. Nowhere in the segment is that key fact mentioned.

It's not surprising that the Republican voters are the only ones Fox cares about, but it's pretty low, even for Fox & Friends, to sub in Republicans' views and pretend that they're everyone's.

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