Fox News divides its daily coverage into two components. There’s the hard-news side, anchored by people like Bret Baier, that offers reporting on what’s unfolding in the world. Then there’s the opinion side, including hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, that offers assessments of those events.
The reality, of course, is that the two sides overlap and bleed into each other. Stories bounce over and run through the putative wall; the difference lies far more in tone than content.
But there is at least one area where there’s no real question of bias: the network’s polling.
Fox’s polls are conducted by two firms, Beacon Research, which does polling for Democratic issues and campaigns, and Shaw & Company Research, which focuses on Republicans. The result is survey research that is consistently reliable — to the extent that the network has at times found itself downplaying its own poll results because they don’t comport with the narrative that’s otherwise driving the day’s shows.
Earlier this week, Fox News released new polling looking at the presidential race in four states: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina. It found that, since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, the race has shifted to the Democrat’s advantage.
Fox News’s pollsters also polled in Arizona and Nevada in June. In Arizona, Trump went from a 5-point lead to a 1-point deficit in a head-to-head polling question. That 6-point shift in the margin was driven heavily by women (where the margin shifted 10 points to Harris) and younger Arizonans (a 13-point shift), mirroring national patterns.
There were similar shifts when respondents were given a broader field of candidates, one that didn’t include recent Trump endorser Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Among White men in Arizona, Trump gained ground with the shift to Harris. That wasn’t the case in Nevada, though, where the overall shift was similar.
In Nevada, there was a shift to the Democrat among both men and women with White men being one of the biggest shifts.
This is the point where we note that the shifts among individual demographic groups in polling are often exaggerated by small sample sizes. The margin of error among White men in Nevada was 5 percent in both June and August, which means that the shift isn’t significant. Nor are the shifts indicated in the Arizona poll. In fact, even the overall shifts aren’t statistically significant.
But they do comport with common sense. The idea that Harris would gain, particularly among women and younger voters, is sensible. That it is happening across polls, along with shifts to Harris in polling averages, reinforces that idea.
The Trump campaign, however, has a different take.
“It’s that time of year again,” it said in a statement on Wednesday. “Fox is releasing atrocious polling.”
Past criticisms of polling from the campaign have relied on the incomprehensible claim that news outlets were intentionally trying to harm Trump’s electoral chances. Perhaps sensing that even Trump supporters probably wouldn’t buy that Fox News wants Trump to lose, the campaign instead identified past Fox News polls that ended up far from the mark.
This is, of course, normal: polling conducted two months prior to an election are often wrong because the state of the race changes over those two months. Campaigns are run. Events unfold. Voters change their minds. The utility of polls like the new ones from Fox are in part that they show how that movement is occurring, not that they are predictive of the outcome.
Even on this point, though, the campaign got out over its skis. The statement includes a line stating that “Fox’s only Georgia poll in 2020 was released in June and that one overstated Joe Biden’s support by 1.7%.” The calculus here is that the Fox News poll, showing Biden with a 47 percent to 45 percent lead, was far from the mark because its 2-point Biden advantage didn’t comport with the 0.3-point win Biden had in the 49.5-percent-to-49.2-percent state.
The motivation here seems to be that the Trump campaign, understanding the vagaries of its candidate, is eager to reinforce the idea that Trump will win in November. These polls from Fox News and others get waved away as invented or dishonest or inept because they run counter to that narrative.
In another sense, though, it’s inevitable. Trump has often complained when Fox News does anything resembling objectivity, like interviewing Democratic elected officials. He’s complained about the channel’s polls before, too — for the same reason. He, like some who work at the channel, believe that its role is to ensure his victory. An objective poll raising questions about that outcome, then, isn’t an unexpected display of fairness by Fox News but, instead, an unacceptable display of disloyalty.