Greg Gutfeld Just Said What Every Conservative Was Already Thinking About CNN’s Polling Circus

May 19, 2026 Cat2, The Media
Alicia97 via shutterstock

CNN spent 40 years building a news brand.

And now a guy with a whiteboard and a "shock poll" is their biggest star.

What Gutfeld said about CNN's data guy Wednesday had even the liberal on the panel nodding along.

The Scam That Everyone Could See

Gutfeld said it plainly on The Five Wednesday: "It's all a scam."

He was reacting to Enten's latest segment – the one where CNN's "chief data analyst" told Democrats their generic ballot lead had shrunk from plus-six to plus-three heading into 2026.

Big surprise of the day for Democrats.

Big surprise of the day for Republicans two weeks earlier.

That's the game – one day it's serotonin for Jesse Watters, the next it's dopamine for Jessica Tarlov.

And even Tarlov couldn't defend it.

When the liberal co-host of The Five concedes that "there is a Harry Enten clip for everything," that tells you everything about the operation.

Republicans Don't Tell Pollsters How They Vote

Gutfeld made the one point that the entire polling industry would rather you forget.

"You never know how things are going to turn out," he said, "because Republicans don't talk about how they vote. That's how Trump surprised everybody."

He's been right about this for a decade.

In 2016, the polls said Hillary Clinton was going to win.

In 2020, national polls overstated Biden's margin by the widest gap in modern presidential polling history.

In 2024, virtually every major pollster understated Trump's support – again.

Post-election analyses confirmed that polls missed Trump's margin in swing states by 2 to 3 percentage points – the third consecutive cycle they failed to capture the breadth of his coalition.

The reason is structural and it isn't going away.

Trump voters distrust the media.

When a CNN pollster calls a Trump supporter, that supporter – who has spent years hearing Trump call CNN "fake news" – hangs up.

The people who answer CNN polls skew toward the people who trust CNN.

The 100 Percent Moment That Proved Everything

Enten's segment on MAGA approval numbers illustrated exactly what Gutfeld was describing.

Enten announced that 100 percent of self-identified MAGA Republicans approved of Trump – one of those numbers, he said, that "jump off the screen."

Trump loved it.

He told a crowd in March, "I got one yesterday from CNN. What is the percentage of people in MAGA, which is most of the Republican Party, by the way, that support the president? The number was 100 percent."

The segment went viral.

The White House shared it across every platform they had.

CNN then had to run another segment walking it back – their own anchor pointing out that Trump's Republican support had actually dropped from 90 percent to 80 percent, with strong support collapsing from 64 percent to 43 percent.

So CNN produced a viral number that made Trump look invincible, let the White House run with it for weeks, then corrected themselves for a second traffic spike.

Both sides clicked. CNN cashed the check twice.

Nobody Is Watching Anymore – And Nobody Trusts Them

Here is where the Enten machine gets genuinely embarrassing.

CNN averaged 573,000 primetime viewers in 2025 – down from 1 million in 2017.

That's a 44 percent collapse while politics got more intense, not less.

Gallup found that media trust hit a record low of 28 percent in 2025.

Republicans' trust in the media? Single digits.

Only 6 percent of Americans told Emerson College pollsters they get their news from CNN or MSNBC.

Gutfeld – on Fox News, with a fraction of the corporate infrastructure – beats CNN in the ratings nearly every day of the week.

So CNN's "chief data analyst" is producing viral shock polls for an audience that barely exists, using methodology that structurally undercounts the voters it claims to analyze, at a network hemorrhaging trust faster than it can hire new data guys.

Gutfeld called it a scam.

The numbers say it's worse than that.

Sources:

  • Frieda Powers, "Greg Gutfeld rails over CNN's data guy Harry Enten: 'It's all a scam!'" BizPac Review, May 14, 2026.
  • "I Am Tired of Harry Enten: Greg Gutfeld Slams CNN's 'Scam' Data Guy," Mediaite, May 14, 2026.
  • "CNN's Harry Enten Serves 'Big Time Reality Check for Democrats,'" Mediaite, May 13, 2026.
  • "CNN Ratings Collapse As Cable Giants Face Extinction," VOR News, February 17, 2026.
  • "Trust in Media at New Low of 28% in U.S.," Gallup, October 2, 2025.
  • "Once again, polls missed a decisive slice of Trump voters in 2024," NBC News, December 3, 2024.