Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade stood up for his network’s polling operation on Friday morning, rebuking Trump campaign spokesperson Hogan Gidley for calling most polls “fake.”
A bevy of new polls showed former Vice President Joe Biden with massive leads in key battleground states that President Donald Trump has to win in order to secure re-election. Fox News’ latest survey, for instance, found Biden comfortably beating the president in Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.
Appearing Friday on the president’s favorite morning show, Gidley tried to boast about the so-called enthusiasm gap between Trump and Biden voters by outrightly dismissing polls showing the ex-veep trouncing the president.
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“You touched on some polls. Most of those are fake,” Gidley declared. “They oversample Democrats.”
The Trump spokesman would go on to talk up Trump’s social-media views and clicks in comparison to Biden’s to assert that the president has more support nationwide.
Kilmeade, however, took that opportunity to defend his network’s pollsters.
“I know the people that do the polls. They don’t do it fake—they do a really good job,” he exclaimed. “They might not be accurate in the end, I don’t know.”
While Gidley acknowledged that “the people are great,” he once again questioned the accuracy of the polls.
“I’m not saying they’re Nostradamus. But I am just saying they’re math, and they’re professionals,” Kilmeade retorted. “So don’t call the Fox News pollsters ‘fake.’”
A somewhat flustered Gidley, meanwhile, tried to find common ground with the pro-Trump hosts, saying: “Well, the methodology is flawed, at the very least, how’s that?”
“That is what the president has said before,” co-host Steve Doocy replied. “He has complained that they have a smaller sample of Republicans that is not indicative of the number of people who voted last time. And so that is where that comes from.”
Gidley’s dismissal of Fox News polls comes days after one of the network’s own anchors publicly admitted to not trusting Fox’s surveys, which are considered among the best in the industry. After claiming on-air that she deliberately misleads pollsters, host Melissa Francis was asked whether she believes Fox’s polls are “garbage.”
“I don’t trust any polling at all based on my personal experience,” she responded.
