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*Donald Trump recently bragged in his speech to the National Rifle Association on Friday that his support among African-Americans has increased since Kanye West expressed his support for him.
His claim has been repeated thousands of times on TV and online. Some media figures have treated it as fact.
The problem is, there’s no reliable data to support that claim.
“Kanye West must have some power because you probably saw I doubled my African American poll numbers,” Trump said during his speech. “We went from 11 to 22 in one week. Thank you, Kanye. Thank you. When I saw the number, I said, ‘That must be a mistake. How can that have happened?’ Even the pollsters thought that must be a mistake.”
It was a mistake, and the news organization responsible for the poll, Reuters, says its data is being misconstrued.
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As noted by CNN Money, on May 2, The Daily Caller published a story titled “Black Male Approval For Trump Doubles In One Week.” The report cited the Reuters poll from April 22, which had “Trump’s approval rating among black men at 11 percent, while the same poll on April 29, 2018, pegged the approval rating at 22 percent.”
The story pointed out that “Reuters only sampled slightly under 200 black males each week.” That nuance was quickly lost as the headline was shared thousands of times on social media.
Meanwhile, back in reality, African American support for Trump has been low ever since he started campaigning.
CNN wouldn’t normally inform its readers about the poll results because the Reuters/Ipsos tracking poll does not meet its standards for reporting.
CNN’s director of polling and election analytics Jennifer Agiesta explained why: “It was conducted using a non-probability online sample, meaning that those who participated signed up to take the poll rather than being randomly selected.” Bottom line: This means “there could be bias in the sample.”
During his NRA speech, Trump asserted that his support “doubled” among African Americans, but he got it wrong. The Daily Caller story cited a jump from 11% to 22% among black men, not men and women combined.
“Now we’ve come a long way. You remember I’d come into big rooms, big audiences, and I’d say, ‘What do you have to lose?’ Because the Democrats have always had their votes. Horrible on crime, horrible on education, horrible on everything. I’d say ‘What do you have to lose?’ And they voted for me. And we won, but now the numbers are much higher than they ever were before with African Americans, and we’re happy,” Trump remarked during the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Dallas on May 4.
Chris Kahn, the U.S. political polling editor for Reuters, said in an email on Saturday that the 11% and 22% data points were misunderstood.
“The sample sizes for those two measurements were too small to reliably suggest any shift in public opinion,” Kahn told CNNMoney through a spokeswoman.
“West is an influential artist, but there is no proof that black men’s views of Trump are shaped significantly — or at all — by the rapper,” the Washington Post’s Eugene Scott wrote Saturday.
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