‘Don’t Call the Fox News Pollsters Fake’: Brian Kilmeade Rebukes Trump Campaign’s Hogan Gidley

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade rebuked a Trump campaign official for calling polls “fake” on air Friday morning.

“You touched on some polls. Most of those are fake,” said Hogan Gidley, the press secretary for President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, on Fox & Friends. “They oversample Democrats.”

Gidley went on to tout the views on Trump’s social media platforms — 1.1 billion, he said — versus the views on the accounts of his rival Joe Biden.

“I know the people that do the polls. They don’t do it fake — they do a really good job,” Kilmeade said. “They might not be accurate in the end, I don’t know.”

“Well the people are great,” Gidley conceded, asking: “Doesn’t accuracy determine how great it is?”

“I’m not saying they’re Nostradamus. But I am just saying they’re math, and they’re professionals,” Kilmeade replied.  “So don’t call the Fox News pollsters fake.”

“Well the methodology is flawed at the very least, how’s that.”

“That is what the president has said before,” Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy said.

There has been a long-running debate about the accuracy of the polls since the pundit class found itself shocked by Trump’s election victory in 2016. Despite the common perception that the 2016 polls were wildly off, Nate Silver has pointed out that “Polls of the November 2016 presidential election were about as accurate as polls of presidential elections have been on average since 1972.” National polling was fairly accurate (showing Hillary Clinton up by a few points), though state polling was less accurate (though not more than average).

The pundits that looked at those numbers and concluded that Clinton would certainly win, however, left the perception that the polling was historically inaccurate.

Trump and his campaign have pointed to their shock victory in 2016 as evidence that Biden’s consistent lead in the 2020 polls does not reflect the reality of the upcoming election. Fox News polls have often faced the president’s wrath.

The network’s latest survey showed Biden beating Trump in battleground states of Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.

Correction: A previous version of this story inaccurately stated that Trump won Minnesota in 2016. Clinton won that state.