LA Times Profiles the Fox News Polling Unit That Has Drawn Trump’s Fury

President Donald Trump has consistently railed against Fox News’ polling operation for giving him “the worst polls.” Recently, the people behind that outfit opened their doors to a reporter from the L.A. Times — to offer some insight on the methods driving Trump’s madness.

In a Monday piece titled “Inside Fox News’ polling ‘nerdquarium,’ whose numbers don’t lie whether Trump likes them or not,” reporter Stephen Battaglio took readers behind-the-scenes of an operation that no less an authority than FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver gave an A rating last year.

Fox News politics editor Chris Stirewalt, the on-air analyst of the network’s polls, said his team takes the comments from Trump in stride.

“When Trump does things like this, people say ‘Can you believe it?’ ” Stirewalt told the L.A. Times. “And I say, ‘Yes, of course I can believe it because every political figure in every cycle has done it.’ Complaining and trying to game the refs about polls and coverage is not a new thing.”

Fox News uses a bipartisan team to conduct their polling — Beacon Research President Chris Anderson, who is a Democrat; and Daron Shaw of Shaw & Co. Research, who is a Republican. They’ve been working with the AP and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago on new methodology over the past few years — according to the L.A. Times report. This method places a greater emphasis on early voting. It, notably, helped Fox to some key early calls in 2018 House races.

Joel Benenson, a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer and longtime Democratic pollster, lauds the Fox surveys.

“They are just honest numbers,” Benenson told the L.A. Times. “Trump doesn’t like them because they are honest numbers and they are horrible for him.”