With the latest CNN poll showing Trump nationally behind Biden by 14 points, Philip Bump does an interesting take on Trump’s need to believe his ultimate victory on the way to his bunker. Trump now has a personal pollster who is committed to telling his client what he wants to hear. Please proceed, IMPOTUS*. Trump’s hope for a repeat of 2016 has as much credibility as claiming pepper balls aren’t chemical irritants.
If there’s a pollster whose results are suspect in this particular tiff, it’s not the pollster Trump is criticizing. It’s the pollster he has asked to offer the criticism.
First of all, that’s a goofy argument. If you want to suppress enthusiasm — something which Trump’s own campaign in 2016 admitted doing — you generally try to do so when people are actually voting. Trying to suppress votes now is like trying to suppress your appetite for Thanksgiving dinner on the Fourth of July. Lots of time for it to return.
What hasn’t been shown to be the case is that pollsters such as CNN and SSRS end up wildly off the mark in national polling because of how they select their respondents and weight their responses.
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