Donald Trump loves to cite polls when they’re favorable for him. But when they’re not? Then they can’t be trusted.
Four years after a polling-skeptical conservative activist Dean Chambers launched a website devoted to unskewing the polls — he later blamed Obama’s victory on voter fraud — Trump supporters are raising similar concerns about polls commissioned by outlets like Fox News and the Washington Post. During a CNN interview Wednesday, Michael Cohen, executive vice president and attorney at the Trump Organization, used uncomfortable silence to try and make a point that polls showing Trump behind Clinton nationally and in crucial swing states don’t reflect the true state of the presidential race. The clip of him doing so has gone viral because of its sheer awkwardness:
During a follow up interview with Yahoo, Cohen said, “I completely disagree with the polling information.” He cited his own outreach work on behalf of Trump to the African American community — a demographic where polls show Trump with as little as one percent support — and the size of crowds at Trump rallies to make his case.
“I think Mr. Trump and Secretary Clinton are substantially closer than the polls indicate,” Cohen explained. “The proof is the massive 20-, 25- and 30,000-person rallies that he is attending on a multiple-time-per-week basis. In all honesty, Hilary Clinton can’t fill a Starbucks even if they offered free ventis.”
Insisting that crowd size at rallies (or even people watching rallies online) is a more accurate barometer of where the race is at than polls is a case regularly made by Bill Mitchell, an online radio host who is one of Trump’s most vocal backers on Twitter.
Imagine there are no polls and we only have empirical evidence. If the media said Trump was losing badly we would all laugh.
— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) August 18, 2016
Trump's last rally had 200,000 streams on YouTube. Hillary's had 7,000. Oh yeah, she is losing big time.
— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) August 5, 2016
Trump-supporting Fox News host Eric Bolling echoed Mitchell’s arguments on The Five on Wednesday.
“Honestly, we have to stop with these polls, they’re insane,” Bolling said. “You look at a Trump rally and there’s 12-, 15,000, 10,000 people and then you look at Hillary Clinton and you have, I don’t know, 1,500, 2,000.”
But cohost Dana Perino pushed back, telling Bolling that “it’s a real disservice to his supporters to lie to them that those polls don’t matter. You cannot take 12,000 people at a rally that are your definite supporters — they are gonna show up to campaign — and then say the polls are wrong.”
Shorter @DanaPerino: That's not how any of this works… (h/t @KatieSimmons_17) pic.twitter.com/si8gk6yjRi
— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) August 18, 2016
Trump himself has expressed skepticism about his increasingly dire polling. During a rally last Friday in Pennsylvania, he said that “the only way we can lose, in my opinion — and I really mean this, Pennsylvania — is if cheating goes on. I really believe it.” Recent polling in Pennsylvania has Clinton up by between nine and 11 points.
In response to the Trump campaign’s concerns about traditional polling, Alex Marlow, editor-in-chief of Breitbart News, recently decided to take matters into his own hands.
“It’s an open secret that polls are often manipulated and spun to create momentum for a particular candidate or issue,” Marlow wrote. “Breitbart News Network’s first national poll marks the start of a major initiative to give our readers an accurate assessment on where the American people stand on the key topics and people of the day — without the mainstream media filter.”
Breitbart‘s first national poll found Clinton leading Trump by five. That’s not good for Trump, but it’s at least less dire than the results of the aforementioned Fox News poll, which found Clinton up 10.