Winter is coming to the White House and a pollster has the line on who’s next to go.
Ipsos Public Affairs correctly predicted which “Game of Thrones” character would perish in the season finale of the hit HBO show and decided to use its polling ability to see who might be spending their final days in the Trump administration.
“When the season ended, it was right about the time that former White House strategist Stephen Bannon left the White House,” Ipsos Vice President Chris Jackson said on Wednesday. “Somebody in the office just had the idea that maybe we should adapt the ‘Game of Thrones’ thing to the White House, considering how much attrition Trump’s staff has had.”
In an August Ipsos poll, 21 percent correctly predicted that Lord Petyr Baelish, the manipulating adviser for Sansa Stark, would be the character most likely to get killed off in the season finale. His throat was slit.
Turning its surveying gaze to the White House, it asked: “Of the following White House or Executive Branch staff members, who do you believe will be the next to resign or be terminated? Will it be…”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions tops the list by an almost two-to-one margin, with 16 percent saying he’s the next in line to depart the administration.
Trump turned up the heat on Sessions in July when he pressured the attorney general to investigate Hillary Clinton’s emails, calling him “beleagured” and “weak.” Next up on the chart is White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.
The poll says 9 percent of those surveyed think Kelly, who became chief of staff in July during a shakeup of West Wing staff, is likely to go.
Tied at 9 percent with Kelly are senior counselor Kellyanne Conway, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Rounding out the list are: senior adviser for policy Stephen Miller at 5 percent, National Economic Council director Gary Cohn at 5 percent, and national security adviser HR McMaster also at 5 percent.
Hope Hicks, named White House communications director on Tuesday, follows at 4 percent.
“The White House is so dependent on the president. I’m not going to pretend to predict what the president’s going to do, I think that’s challenging,” Jackson said of the survey. “But I think what we are capturing here is a good sense of what’s happening in sort of the wider media landscape and who’s getting a lot of heat from a number of different sources.”
