Donald Trump has the solution to unfavorable polls: remind people that they are wrong
The US president has commented that the polls that do not show him leading the re-election race are false and his advisers have begun to avoid giving him bad news.
"I'm not losing," US President Donald Trump insisted in an interview he gave to Fox News host Chris Wallace on July 21, after he was presented with the latest survey from the cable television network, which showed that former Vice President Joe Biden was leading him by eight points nationally.
The president, who often promotes poll numbers when they are favorable to him - and even regularly advertises a "GOP 96 percent Approval Rate" without citing any source for the questionable statistic - said public polls that showed him losing were "false in 2016, and now they are even more false."
These days, there aren't many campaign metrics to encourage a president who loves to cite the records that he has broken. He has not been able to fill a stadium with supporters since the coronavirus pandemic began, and Biden has surpassed him in two consecutive months. Unlike Hillary Clinton's slight lead in national polls four years ago, Biden has held a nearly double-digit lead for more than a month, according to an average of multiple polls.
In response, the Trump campaign has emphasized "boat parades" as a measure of voter enthusiasm. The most recent record Trump has broken and promoted online is a heat index. "Maybe we set a record for doing an interview in that heat," Trump tweeted on Tuesday 21, referring to his interview with Wallace outdoors. "It was 37 degrees Celsius, so things were very interesting!"
Meanwhile, his campaign and his top aides have echoed his attempts to discredit public polls, in an effort to dismiss them as an extension of "the media." The Trump team sent a letter to CNN requesting that the network withdraw publication of a June poll that showed Trump behind Biden (the network said it defends the poll of him). Additionally, in a recent interview with Newsweek, Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law who also oversees the campaign, dismissed public polls as "pure lies."
According to his assistants, Trump knows the picture is not looking good for him, but he simply believes that public polls exaggerate the situation. His campaign does not conduct national polls, but his assistants have presented him with internal data on pendulum states that show tighter competition than the numbers in public polls show. His pollsters frequently tell him that he is in close competition and that there is more bias in media polls today than there was four years ago, a claim that is not supported by any measurable metric. They assure him that his base remains participatory and enthusiastic and that those in the center who were perhaps going to support them in March have left through no fault of his own.
According to advisers, this has led Trump to believe that public polls exaggerate Biden's advantage and have led him to claim that they only offer a snapshot of the moment. However, his internal numbers still show him behind Biden, and he is concerned about where he is. He more regularly asks his co-workers: "What should we do?" and quizzes his friends on "How does everything look?" while he corrects course in public, the advisers said.
Over the course of several weeks, Trump has changed his position on the promotion of masks, assuring that it was "patriotic" to wear face masks, and resurrected the daily press conference on the coronavirus: with this he acknowledges that he needs to be seen as someone who takes the virus seriously.
On the night of July 22, campaign aides circulated a CNBC story in which host Jim Cramer mentioned that Trump's belated approval of the masks had triggered a rebound in recovery measures.
Without any courtesy, the president also demoted his longtime campaign manager, Brad Parscale, and his campaign has directed most of its advertising resources to launching a message focused on law enforcement and order - in a new ad. television wrongly claims that if Biden is elected, the country's police departments will cease to exist.
His political opponents assume that he knows he is losing, and in a bad way, and that widely dismissing public polls as “false” is part of a strategy to sow doubt and confusion in November. "When he says the polls are bogus he helps lay the groundwork for saying the election is rigged," said William Kristol, a conservative writer and prominent Republican who was part of the "Never Trump" movement. And he added: “because, for his brand to move forward, he depends on becoming the victim of a rigged system and not accepting defeat. He has a general interest in discrediting the truth and this is part of an attack on the truth. "
However, his aides commented that, even in private conversations, Trump has not allowed the reality of his current political position to be fully understood.
"No one has ever recovered from something similar," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute of Public Opinion, referring to the advantage that Biden has over Trump. Indeed, it has been nearly 25 years since Bill Clinton held such a wide lead over his opponent, Bob Dole, in 1996.
However, when donors and external allies have been direct with Trump and have told him that, in fact, he is losing, the president has not agreed, arguing that the situation is on the mend and that there is still plenty of time for the better, according to Republicans familiar with those conversations who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"My polls show that we are getting a real move from Rushmore," Trump told several associates, referring to his July 4 speech at Mount Rushmore, in which he defined the campaign as a battle against a "new far-left fascism. "Which seeks to eliminate the values and history of the nation. White House advisers called the speech a success, albeit a temporary one that was quickly overtaken by Trump's defense of the Confederate flag. However, Biden's campaign has seen no real improvement in the way voters perceive Trump since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a person familiar with the campaign data. The impression voters have of Trump, the person said, has only gotten more negative.
In private conversations, Trump also cited the general election debates as an opportunity to improve his position in the race, and he told his allies that he expects his opponent to perform poorly in that format.
Trump's view of his position in the race is partly the result of believing his own myth after the 2016 victory - all the forecasts were wrong and he was right - and partly the more optimistic picture. who hears from certain advisers about the state of the race.
A president who loves numbers - the stock market when it is rising, the monthly employment report when it translates into a positive story for him - particularly loves polls, as in the 2016 primary season, when he was outperforming. to his Republican rivals. He also has a great outlet if he doesn't like polls: November 2016.
His assistants are in charge of giving him his poll numbers, beyond cable TV and newspaper articles, and some focus on distorting the electoral landscape to avoid his anger: They have gone so far that they have told him that he wins In states like Maine, where it's losing. Attendees mentioned that even advisers who are willing to give you bad news no longer tell you the whole picture.
One of Trump's top pollsters, Tony Fabrizio, often had the most dire predictions and was known for not shying away from the task of informing the president when "the sky is falling." Yet according to attendees, the entire world has been tiptoeing around the president since June, when he threatened to sue Parscale after he presented poll data showing Trump trailing Biden in several crucial states.
Now, according to his aides, even the most extreme prediction advisers attribute poor results to external factors, often blaming news coverage of Trump's collapse.
The campaign argued that there was nothing concerning that should be reported to the president.
"We monitor 17 states that will decide who will be the next president and we are confident in the methodology," said Tim Murtaugh, the campaign's communications director. "In those states, our data shows that President Trump maintains his strength against Joe Biden and is well positioned for reelection."
