Two new polls show Trump’s approval numbers plummeting with just days to go before his inauguration—but there’s more to meets the eye.

Both the latest ABC/Washington Post and NBC polls show Trump at just 40% approval—making him one of the most unpopular incoming presidents in history.
But a deeper look into the polls’ methodology shows some eyebrow-raising (and intentional) cooking of the numbers.

Out of everyone polled by ABC/Washington Post, just 23% of those were Republicans—a startling low number, considering that 29% of Americans are registered Republican voters.

For comparison, ABC’s final poll before the 2016 election showed Hillary Clinton up by a whopping 12%. While Clinton would win the popular vote, she won it by just 2%—a ten point difference, far outside the poll’s margin of error. ABC’s past poll bias against Trump suggests that, if the sample audience for their latest approval poll is weighted similarly to their pre-election polling, these latest findings on Trump’s approval rating could be equally skewed, by up to 10 percentage points.
On NBC’s poll, the bias was just as pronounced: 44% of those polled identified as independent voters, despite the fact that just 34% of Americans identify as independent voters overall. They had a similarly low representation of Republicans: just 24% of those polled—again, 29% of Americans are Republicans.

The mainstream media is out to get Trump—even if it means sacrificing their journalistic “neutrality” as they did during the election, and even if it means sacrificing their polling methodology now.

No doubt, Trump takes office as one of the most controversial modern Presidents—but the latest polls showing his approval rates plummeting may not be as factual as the mainstream media likes to pretend.