Last week, a Morning Consult poll found that President Trump received a bounce from the GOP Convention, but that his standing among black voters declined somewhat. I found the latter result surprising, given the relentlessness with which Republicans appealed to Blacks during the convention.
Now, a Hill-HarrisX poll finds that Trump’s support among black voters was up by 9 percentage points after the first two days of the Republican Convention. 24 percent of registered black voters in the Aug. 22-25 survey said they approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 76 percent said they disapprove. In an Aug. 8-11 survey only 15 percent of this cohort approved of the president’s performance. (Hill-HarrisX also found that Trump’s approval rating increased by 2 points among Latino voters, a result that probably lacks statistical significance.)
The Hill-HarrisX result on the view of black voters makes more sense to me than the Morning Consult result does. I’m a little surprised, though, that Trump got this much of a bounce with Blacks from just two days of the convention. Television ratings for the first two days weren’t great, and I wonder how many Blacks tuned in. Perhaps Tim Scott’s great speech spread among Blacks through social media, etc.
Oddly, the Hill-HarrisX poll found that Trump’s approval rating among all voters declined by one point from August 8-11 through August 22-25. A one point decline isn’t statistically significant, but the result suggests the absence of a convention bounce.
Hill-HarrisX and Morning Consult thus reached opposite results on both a Black bounce and an overall bounce. My guess is that Trump did receive a convention bounce of 3-4 points and a bounce among Black voters, though perhaps a smaller one than Hill-HarrisX found.
The real lesson, though, is that we shouldn’t take polls like these very seriously — not at this point, anyway.
