The media jumped on the recent survey conducted by political science professors Brandon Rottinghaus of the University of Houston and Justin S. Vaughn of Boise State University, which asked for responses on presidential greatness from former and current presidents and executive politics section members of the American Political Science Association (APSA).
The survey, entitled, “The 2018 Presidents and Executive Politics Presidential Greatness Survey,” used only 170 responses.
CNN’s summary claimed that Trump was dead-last in the survey, as did other media outlets. However, the media neglected to mention the APSA’s past stances on President Trump’s policies. In other words, the APSA is not a neutral source of information on the Trump administration.
When one goes to the APSA website, the APSA press release section consists of the following condemnations of the president’s policies:
- Criticism of revoking DACA
- Graduate student provisions in an earlier version of tax reform legislation
- Opposition to budget cuts to academia
- Decrying an executive order on immigration, called the “Muslim ban” by the media
In other words, it’s a lot like those surveys of professors that ask them to name America’s greatest presidents which the media eat up every year. Given the ideological composition of the professoriate, it’s no surprise that, they too, downgrade Republicans, particularly conservative ones.
