WASHINGTON — Even as he is embroiled in an immigration policy debate that has focused on whether he used vulgar language to describe Haiti and African countries, President Trump is claiming that he is delivering for black Americans — and that they are repaying him with their support.
In a Twitter post on Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump said that “unemployment for Black Americans is the lowest ever recorded” and “Trump approval ratings with black Americans has doubled.” He appeared to credit the comments to a segment on “Fox & Friends,” the morning program on Fox News.
The tweet — half misleading and half downright false — demonstrates how inaccurate information can trickle to the president’s social media, which is then is viewed by millions of people on Twitter and
Facebook.
“Believe it or not, through all this negative coverage, they did a survey of 600,000 people about how black America views this president. His numbers have actually doubled,” Brian Kilmeade, a “Fox & Friends” host,
said during the segment that was broadcast Tuesday morning.
Mr. Kilmeade was almost certainly referring to a distorted finding from
Survey Monkey, an online polling company. Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the company has conducted 602,134 interviews with adults of every race group — not just “black America,” as Mr. Kilmeade said.
Survey Monkey’s results, provided to The New York Times, show that Mr. Trump’s approval ratings among black Americans actually declined from 20 percent in February 2017, his first full month in office, to 15 percent in December. (This is consistent with polling from
the Pew Research Centerand
Reuters.)
How did Mr. Kilmeade and, by extension, Mr. Trump arrive at his approval doubling among black Americans?
Survey Monkey broke out some of the results for The Atlantic, telling the magazine in a report that was published last week that
23 percent of black men and 11 percent of black women approved of Mr. Trump’s performance.
Breitbart News followed with its own report on Sunday, comparing the Survey Monkey results with exit polls from the 2016 presidential campaign.
“That score averages out to 17 percent, or twice the 8 percent score he was given in the 2016 exit polls,” Breitbart reasoned in an article headlined, “
Donald Trump’s Support Among Blacks Has Doubled Since 2016, Amid Racism Claims.”
It is inaccurate to simply take the average of two genders without taking into account the number of people who were actually interviewed for the poll. Survey Monkey interviewed roughly 19,000 black men and 31,000 black women.