After a new round of polls showed him losing to all of the top Democratic candidates, Trump claimed to have polls showing him winning against everyone.
Trump tweeted:
Internal REAL Polls show I am beating all of the Dem candidates. The Fake News Polls (here we go again, just like 2016) show losing or tied. Their polls will be proven corrupt on November 3rd, just like the Fake News is corrupt!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 19, 2020
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The White House has been known to produce some biased and slanted polls to appease Trump. It is a longstanding rule of political campaigning that if a campaign has good news, they don’t keep it hidden. If Trump had real polls showing him beating every single top tier Democrat, those polls would be blasted all over Fox News and Trump’s Twitter account.
Trump doesn’t have those sort of credible polls because they don’t exist. Internal polls are polls that are conducted. They are not considered objective or reliable.
It is important to note that the polls were not wrong in 2016. Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote and beat Trump by nearly 3 million votes. The idea that polls can’t be trusted plays into Trump’s hands because when people stop believing reliable data, it opens the door for lies to take hold.
Tweets about imaginary polls can’t obscure the reality that Trump is not in a great position heading into the fall campaign.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
