Why polling averages may not capture the depths of Trump’s growing unpopularity

The New York Times average of Trump polls.

For most of his first term and now his second, Donald Trump has been deeply unpopular. Both The New York Times and polling analyst Nate Silver track his approval/disapproval ratings based on an average of polls.

As of Monday, Trump was at 55% disapprove/41% approve using the Times’ methodology. Silver has him at a nearly identical 55.4% disapproval/41% approval. There are others who do the same thing, but the Times and Silver may be the best known.

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Yet despite everything, Trump’s numbers don’t move as much as you might think they would given the corrupt and chaotic nature of his presidency. Indeed, on Monday, Trump’s disapproval rating actually nudged down by a statistically insignificant amount, from 56% to 55%. And no matter what, a rock-solid minority of just over 40% sticks with him. How could this be?

This morning I’d like to suggest one possible explanation. I’m not a polling expert, but this is obvious and starting us right in the face. The Times’ average is based on a number of polls, some of which it regards as highly reliable, some of which it doesn’t. And, for the most part, Trump is doing considerably worse when measured solely by highly reliable polls.

For instance, the most recent Gallup poll shows Trump at minus 24, with 60% disapproving of his job performance and just 36% approving. The American Research Group has him at minus 27, with 62% approval/35% disapproval. Beacon Research/Shaw and Co. reports that Trump is at minus 17, Ipsos at minus 22.

Now, as I said, the Times showed Trump’s disapproval rating ticked down slightly on Monday. And when you look at the chart, you see that it’s because a poll from TIPP Insights was added to the mix. TIPP, which does not meet the Times’ criteria for reliability, had Trump at just minus 4, based on 43% approval/47% disapproval.

Some of the less reliable polls, especially YouGov, do show Trump with a disapproval gap as wide as the reliable polls. But when you scan down the list, you see a number of less reliable polls showing that Trump’s disapproval rating is on the narrow side — Morning Consult (minus 7), InsiderAdvantage (minus 5), Big Data Poll (minus 5) and RMG Research (minus 7).

As I said, I’m not a polling expert, and it’s likely that the Times has weighted the reliable polls more heavily than the more dubious surveys. But Gallup, in particular, has been the gold standard for generations, and maybe we ought to take them more seriously than an index that includes both the good and the bad.

Why does it matter? Because if Trump is losing support, then the likelihood increases that House and Senate Republicans will be willing to stand up to him at least occasionally. Until recently, the Republicans have been utterly craven, cheering enthusiastically for Trump’s every incoherent pronouncement.

But now we’re starting to see a little movement. Marjorie Taylor Greene is one sign. Another is that Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker the other day actually referred to Pete Hegseth as the “secretary of defense” rather than his cosplay role as the “secretary of war.”

Hegseth posts demented tweet following charges that he ordered the killings of two injured men

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Pete Hegseth, our seriously deranged secretary of defense, posted this on Twitter Sunday night. As of this moment, it’s still up.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that, back in September, Hegseth ordered that two injured men clinging to a boat in the Caribbean that U.S. forces had just blown apart be killed in a second attack. Experts have already said that Hegseth could be charged with murder, war crimes or both.

As you might expect, Hegseth’s shockingly demented tweet is inspiring a host of memes. Here’s one:

Donald Trump has denied that Hegseth ordered the killings, but we’re starting to see the first stirrings of Republicans Congress demanding accountability. We’ll see how far that goes.

A New York Times gift-link bacchanalia, from the hazards of AI to an aging Trump to chatty cats

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. Photo (cc) 2019 by TechCrunch.

Here we go again. It’s the last day of the month, and I haven’t shared all of my gift links to The New York Times. Use ’em or lose ’em. These should continue to work for some time to come; what matters is when I post them, not when you access them. So here we go.

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Caffè Nero apologizes and vows to bolster training after a racially charged case of mistaken identity

Photo (cc) 2023 by Martin Lewison.

The coffee shop chain that refused service to retired GBH News reporter Phillip Martin at one of its stores recently will bolster its “anti-discrimination and harassment training,” according to its chief operating officer.

Caffè Nero COO Paul Morgan was quoted in an update published Wednesday afternoon by Boston.com. Reporter Abby Patkin writes that Martin met with company officials earlier this week for what he described as a “very cordial, pleasant conversation.” He added that he accepted their apologies, saying, “I told them I had no interest whatsoever in anyone being fired over this.”

Although Martin, a former colleague of mine at GBH, handled the situation with his customary class, what happened to him raises some troublesome issues. The facts as originally laid out in The Boston Globe were that a barista thought Martin resembled someone (sub. req.) who had recently caused trouble at the Central Square store recently, even relieving himself inside.

Yet Martin now says he’s seen a photo of that person, and he was “befuddled,” adding, “I looked at the photo, and I told them, ‘He looks nothing like me.’” Patkin reports that Martin says the person in the photo was a much younger, light-skinned Black man.

Neither the original Globe story nor the Boston.com follow-up reports whether the barista is white, although it’s clearly implied that she is given that Martin filed complaints with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination and the Cambridge Human Rights Commission, and that Caffè Nero is going to double down on training.

Those of us who are white have an obligation not to fall into the trap of confusing one person of color with another. If the barista had paused for a moment and thought about whether Martin truly resembled the person who’d gone off in her store earlier, she almost certainly would have realized that he didn’t.

Todd Landfried tells us about The Local, his vision for streaming video newscasts in all 50 states

Click on image to watch video.

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Todd Landfried, co-founder and CEO of N2 Media Holdings. As consumers cut the cord on cable TV, he hopes to develop a sustainable model for local news production.

We know from our research that local television news is still highly trusted. His mission: to reinvent local news for the streaming era. Landfried’s idea, called The Local, is to develop statewide newscasts in Colorado, and eventually in all 50 states, that would be carried on the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube.

Todd Landfried. Photo via LinkedIn.

Ellen is back and fully bionic after a short hiatus for knee replacement surgery.

I’ve got a Quick Take about a finding in a recent report by LION Publishers that gets into how to think about raising money. LION, as most of our listeners know, stands for Local Independent Online News. Anyway, its latest sustainability report found that startup news organizations can’t just hope that revenues are something that are going to materialize. Fundraising takes dedicated employees, as I explain.

Ellen’s Quick Take is on an alt-weekly in Seattle called The Stranger that has become an influential political force, as The New York Times recently reported (sub. req.). This summer, 47 candidates for local office paid a call on the newsroom in order to seek an editorial endorsement. And they brought snacks!

You can listen to our conversation here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Northeastern researchers offer a lifeline for TV newsrooms seeking younger audiences

The following is a press release from Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.

Researchers and local journalism experts at Northeastern University, in partnership with industry-leading audience research firm SmithGeiger Group, have published a survival guide for local TV newsrooms that are struggling to reach a new generation of news consumers.

The Reinventing Local TV News Project recommends that news organizations hire a Digital Content Creator, a role researchers tested in three major market newsrooms for a year of experimentation on digital platforms. Reinvent: A Survival Guide for Local TV News offers guidance for news organizations and journalists on how to integrate that new role into the newsroom, the most effective ways for Digital Content Creators to tell stories, and ways to measure the reach of that work.

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A retired journalist says he was refused service and told he was confused with another Black man

Phillip Martin at Boston University earlier this year. Photo (cc) 2025 by Dan Kennedy.

A former GBH News colleague of mine has gotten caught up in a mess involving a Cambridge coffee shop in which he was told he’d been mixed up with another Black man who’d reportedly caused trouble.

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Phillip Martin, an award-winning journalist who retired earlier this year, told The Boston Globe (sub. req.) that he was refused service at a Caffè Nero in Central Square last Thursday after he attempted to order a cup of tea. Martin said he was there to meet another journalist. Globe reporters Nick Stoico and Alexa Coultoff write:

A woman working at the counter told Martin that her boss instructed her not to serve him if he came into the cafe again, according to Martin. He said he told her she must be mistaking him for someone else, but the woman insisted, “No, we have you on video.”

Martin and the employee each called police, he said. After officers spoke with Martin and the cafe worker separately, they told Martin that he was allowed to stay.

In addition to his work as an investigative reporter for GBH Radio, Martin would also pop up on various GBH-TV shows, including “Basic Black” and “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” on which I was a regular panelist until it was canceled in 2021. I thought Phillip brought a particularly erudite sensibility to the program.

More recently, I spoke with Martin this past summer for a story he was working on about the dangers posed by so-called pink-slime news outlets — that is, websites that appear to be legitimate sources of local news but that are actually part of a politically motivated network, and that are increasingly powered by AI.

I posted about the Caffè Nero incident on Facebook Sunday evening, and Martin added a comment that I quote here with his permission:

I’m not personally boycotting Caffe Nero or encouraging anyone else to. It’s not my favorite coffee but that’s not the point. The only thing I was trying to accomplish is for the cafe to be held accountable and aware of potentially discriminatory practices and policies. Distributing a video of someone who is identified as a miscreant without some type of training about racial and other common forms of misidentification is a recipe for disaster. And I also thought it important to emphasize that no one should be fired over this.

According to the Globe, a Caffè Nero spokesperson said by email that a person closely resembling Martin had recently been “abusive to the staff” and had relieved himself inside. “While it is not acceptable to confuse any customer with another, the prior incident was traumatic for the barista involved and it triggered her response,” the spokesperson was quoted as saying. “Everyone at Caffè Nero is deeply sorry for the behaviour towards Mr. Martin, which should not have happened, even though it was a genuine error driven by a recent prior experience.”

Martin has reportedly filed complaints with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination and the Cambridge Human Rights Commission.

In 2021, The Boston Globe Magazine published a personal essay (sub. req.) by Phillip in which he recalled the culture shock of coming to Boston in the 1970s to fight racism. He was so bruised and battered by the experience that he returned home to Detroit — only to come back a year later and stay. He wrote:

Boston was a 1970s version of 1960s Birmingham, Alabama, in my view, with white grievance over desegregation and voting rights updated as white protests over school desegregation through court-ordered busing. That history was precisely why I enlisted, somewhat naively, to go to Boston in the summer of 1975: to fight against racism.

We like to tell ourselves that Boston has come a long way since then, and perhaps it has. But Phillip’s encounter at Caffè Nero shows that we still have a long way to go.

Marisa Kabas is the alternative to wallowing in Olivia Nuzzi’s tale of dysfunction and deceit

Photo of Marisa Kabas via The Handbasket.

Colby Hall’s Mediaite commentary about Olivia Nuzzi is winning a lot of praise. The redoubtable Jay Rosen goes so far as to call it “the best thing I have read about her.”

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This morning I’d like to offer a countervailing view. Hall’s take is smart, but it’s not quite as smart as a lot of people seem to think. Ultimately, Hall is caught up in a particular kind of insular, New York-based media world that has little to do with the experience of actual journalists. As just one example, I’m going to offer the career that independent journalist Marisa Kabas has built for herself, so stay tuned.

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Layoffs in Dallas by Hearst provoke a bitter ‘we told you so’ from Alden Global Capital

Photo (cc) 2013 by Joe Mabel.

Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund responsible for hollowing out newspapers from coast to coast and at all points in between, is trying to have the last laugh at rival Hearst’s expense.

Earlier this week it was reported that The Dallas Morning News would lay off 26 employees, eliminating the entire copy desk and outsourcing print page production. Rachel Behrndt of WFAA-TV wrote that the paper’s union said the move violated the collective bargaining agreement.

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But Behrndt also noted that the Morning News was adding 18 new positions.

The Hearst chain acquired the Morning News in September after a several-months-long bidding war with Alden that resulted in Hearst’s paying a higher price than it had originally offered — but less than Alden was prepared to pay.

Following the layoffs, Alden’s MediaNews Group, one of two newspaper chains that it owns, issued a statement saying that it was “unfortunate that Hearst duped Dallas Morning News controlling shareholder Robert Decherd into handing over control of this storied newspaper, his legacy now tarnished forever,” according to Bron Maher of A Media Operator.

“MediaNews Group was obviously the superior operator bidding to buy the newspaper,” the statement continued. “These newsroom cuts should be a stark warning to anyone who considers selling to Hearst and, even worse, at a massive discount.”

Current and former staff members at papers such as the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register and the Boston Herald, all of which have been hollowed out under Alden’s ownership, might differ with that assertion.

Not to get all dewy-eyed about Hearst, a corporate chain with multiple media holdings, including 28 daily newspapers. But those papers are generally held in high regard. The Hearst approach is to form groups of newspapers within a state and to focus on statewide and regional coverage. Thus the chain has rolled up most of Texas’ papers, including the Houston Chronicle, the Austin American-Statesman and the San Antonio Express-News — and now The Dallas Morning News.

Nor should the layoffs have come as a surprise. The Morning News’ public editor, Stephen Buckley, wrote more than a month ago:

We will be removing positions that are duplicated as a result of the merger, and those employees will be leaving the company over the next six months. In many cases, we will reinvest those dollars in positions we need to take advantage of the new digital capabilities.

Indeed, the whole point to forming regional groups is to eliminate redundancies, which leads to layoffs but also to the opportunity to add new positions, as Hearst is doing in Dallas.

There is no substitute for committed local ownership, and it’s a shame that the previous owners of the Morning News decided to sell. In both the short and the long term, though, its staff and its readers are far better off with Hearst than they would have been with Alden Global Capital.