While President Trump will undoubtedly face another landslide loss in DC when all of the ballots are tabulated, a poll released yesterday suggests that he’s actually gained ground with locals during his four years in the White House.
The poll, released yesterday by SurveyMonkey–and obtained via FiveThirtyEight–finds Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in the presidential election by an 88-to-10-percent margin. While that’s certainly a drubbing, it’s a significant improvement from four years ago, when Hillary Clinton beat him by an even wider, 93-to-4-percent margin.
What factors are at play here? For one, it’s possible that the men and women who have moved to the District for jobs in his administration have worked to bump up the president’s poll numbers a bit. But it’s equally likely that the SurveyMonkey poll simply isn’t all that reliable; FiveThirtyEight grades the poll as a D-.
Luke Mullins is a senior writer at Washingtonian magazine focusing on the people and institutions that control the city’s levers of power. He has written about the Koch Brothers’ attempt to take over The Cato Institute, David Gregory’s ouster as moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, the collapse of Washington’s Metro system, and the conflict that split apart the founders of Politico.
