Trump Claims Polls Are Saying Biden, Sanders Lose To Him — But They’re Actually Saying Just The Opposite

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Last updated on July 18th, 2023 at 11:58 am

President Donald Trump quoted a tweet from a “Bernie or Bust” Twitter user on Tuesday, in which that user suggested Trump would defeat former Vice President Joe Biden in a head-to-head national election.

Trump agreed, but said he would also defeat Sen. Bernie Sanders as well.

“Polls say they BOTH lose to ‘Trump,'” the president wrote in his tweet.

The thing is, it doesn’t appear that many polls conducted this year so far shows Trump ahead of either Biden or Sanders. In fact, the vast majority of them show Trump losing to both candidates.

According to Real Clear Politics, which tracks polling data and compiles them into averages, Sanders has close to an average 5-point lead over Trump, if the election for president were held today. The spread is even wider for Biden, who leads Trump by 6.5 points on average, as of today.

Trump has consistently been behind both candidates, as well as a number of other Democratic hopefuls who had previously been in the race. Polling from CNN/SSRS, for example, found that he’s 10-points behind Biden in a national head-to-head contest.

Trump has, in the past, promoted polling data that have been described as outliers — frequently, he touts Rasmussen polls, a right-leaning polling outfit, that shows him with 50 percent (or higher) approval ratings, while most other polls show him in negative net-approval territory.

It’s possible that Trump’s own internal polling from his campaign may have different numbers than what the national polling data from other sources are showing. But even if that was the case, it’d be unreliable.

In June last year, some of Trump’s internal polling data was leaked out, embarrassing the president because it showed that even his own team believed he was in trouble, electorally speaking, against Biden. As a result, perhaps because of the leak or perhaps because he didn’t like the findings, Trump ended up firing those pollsters.

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Chris Walker

Chris Walker is a freelance journalist based in Madison, Wisconsin, who focuses on news, politics, and analysis of world events. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, since 2005 Chris has reported on workers' rights protests in Wisconsin, opined on four separate presidential elections and written on a number of other political subjects for a variety of national online publications.