The Pollster Who Called 2016 and 2024 Just Went on Laura Ingraham and Made a Guarantee That Has Democrats Sweating

The mainstream media told you Trump had a 15% chance of winning the night before the 2016 election.

The man who got it right just went on Fox News and made a guarantee nobody in the polling industry wants you to hear.

He attached his name to a specific number – and if he's right, Democrats are walking into the midterms blind.

Matt Towery Says Trump Approval Rating Polls Are Wrong and He Has the Track Record to Prove It

Matt Towery runs InsiderAdvantage.

RealClearPolitics has ranked it among the nation's most accurate polling firms across multiple presidential cycles.

He called 2016 for Trump when the networks were already drafting their Clinton victory graphics.

He called 2024.

He sat down with Laura Ingraham on The Ingraham Angle and said the quiet part out loud.

"I want people to know right now, the polling that you're seeing come in on Trump is incorrect."

Not skewed.

Not misleading.

Flat wrong.

Towery told Ingraham that Trump carries a loyal floor of 43 to 44 percent on any given day of the month – and when he's performing well, he's above 50.

Then he put his reputation behind it on live television.

"The pollsters are wrong. And I'm right. I guarantee I'm right about that."

He also told her something the mainstream outlets have zero interest in reporting.

"His polling numbers among Republicans are the best they have ever been. They're at the height."

The Shy Trump Voter Effect Has Mainstream Pollsters Getting the 2026 Midterms Wrong Again

The night before Election Day 2016, the New York Times gave Trump a 15% chance of winning.

He won 306 electoral votes.

After that disaster, the American Association of Public Opinion Research called the 2016 miss the worst polling failure since 1980 – the year they told the country it would be close and Ronald Reagan won 44 states.

The industry admitted the problem, rewrote its formulas, updated its sampling models, and promised it would never happen again.

Then they missed 2024.

Towery laid out the core failure to Ingraham directly: most pollsters never calibrate their likely voter universe against Trump's actual election results.

Instead they build their models on census data and standard turnout assumptions – which means Trump's voters fall through every time.

The ones who screen unknown numbers, the ones who sat out every election for thirty years before 2016 and haven't missed one since.

Craig Patrick, Fox 13's political editor, confirmed the structural problem after speaking with Towery: landline-based polling has grown increasingly unreliable as call-screening has expanded, leaving survey samples less and less representative of who actually votes.

Towery told Sean Hannity there is a "blackout on accurate pollsters."

InsiderAdvantage, Trafalgar, Rasmussen – the firms that top the accuracy rankings – never appear on mainstream news programs.

The ones with documented misses keep getting booked.

The ones who got it right keep getting frozen out.

The Media Knows What Bad Polling Does to Republican Turnout and They're Running the Same Play

Trump claimed a CNN poll showed 100% Republican support.

CNN's Jake Tapper knocked it down – their actual number has Trump at 80% among Republicans, down from 90% in March 2025, with strong support falling from 64% to 43% over that same stretch.

That slide is real.

But it's still 80%.

And Towery's argument cuts deeper than any single number.

Presidential approval among the base is the single strongest predictor of midterm turnout for the president's party.

When Republicans believe their man is winning, they show up.

When the media spends six months convincing them he's polling in the mid-thirties and finished, some of them don't.

That's what coordinated bad polling accomplishes – it's turnout suppression dressed up as journalism.

They ran this same play before 2016.

Towery isn't saying the numbers are off by a point or two.

He's saying Trump has a loyal 43 to 44 percent on any day of the month, not the sub-40 figures flooding the airwaves – and he guaranteed it on camera.

The man who called it right twice sat down with Laura Ingraham, put his name on a specific number, and told the entire polling industry they have it wrong again.

If history is any guide, he already knows something they don't.

Sources:

• Willa Pope Robbins, "MAGA Pollster Says Everyone Has Trump's Approval Ratings Wrong – Except Him: 'I'm Right,'" Mediaite, May 6, 2026.
• Matt Towery, "InsiderAdvantage's Matt Towery: 'There's A Blackout On Accurate Pollsters,'" RealClearPolitics, May 4, 2025.
• Matt Towery, "InsiderAdvantage National Survey: Trump Bounces Back to 50% Approval," InsiderAdvantage, February 3, 2026.
• Daniel Dale, "Fact check: No, Trump doesn't have a 100% approval rating among Republicans," CNN Politics, May 6, 2026.
• Craig Patrick, "Why you can't always trust the political polls – and what to watch in 2026," Fox 13, January 3, 2026.