In a new memo, the Trump campaign said polls by media organizations are wrong, but it shared no alternatives showing Trump winning.
The Trump campaign on Sunday released a memo saying not to believe the polls, after a spate of them showed presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden crushing Donald Trump both in every swing state and nationally.
The memo, written by Trump's Deputy Campaign Manager Bill Stepien, claims that Biden has a "lack of enthusiastic support" and that the polling showing Biden with a commanding lead is wrong because it's "based on cheaper, inferior methods and should rightly be viewed as flawed and non-predictive."
The memo, however, provided no internal polls from Trump's campaign showing Trump with a lead.
Multiple news stories say that the Trump campaign is privately conceding that their own surveys show Biden is winning and Trump needs to make a change. Yet publicly, the campaign is trying to deny that reality, instead coming up with reasons for why Trump is actually in good shape.
Currently, the campaign claims Trump has an "enthusiasm" advantage among Republican voters and that Biden has yet to bring together Democratic voters.
The memo states that Trump received a larger percentage of GOP votes in the primary than Barack Obama did when he ran for reelection in 2012.
"President Trump has received more votes than Obama in 23 of the 27 states which have held primaries in both 2020 and 2012 (the year President Barack Obama ran for re-election). In many cases, President Trump received two- or three-times Obama's totals," it reads.
However, Obama won reelection in 2012, despite the Trump campaign claiming there was a lack of enthusiasm from Democratic primary voters.
The memo also fails to mention that polls show Democratic voters have coalesced behind Biden in a head-to-head match-up with Trump.
The New York Times/Siena College poll from last week — which showed Biden trouncing Trump by a whopping 14 points — showed Biden receiving 90% of self-identified Democratic voters. That's identical to the 90% of self-identified Republican voters who say they back Trump.
The memo then goes on to disregard all the public polling that current gives Biden a 9.2% lead over Trump in RealClearPolitics' national polling average.
It says that public polling cannot be trusted because it is financed by media organizations that it claims are trying to "set a narrative that conforms with their own worldviews."
That argument tracks with a bizarre legal threat a Trump campaign legal adviser sent to CNN demanding it take down a poll showing Biden winning by 14 points — findings that have been confirmed by multiple subsequent public polls that all show Biden with a double-digit lead.
But the memo offers no internal polling from Trump's campaign that disputes the findings that Trump is in historically bad shape months out from Election Day.
It's unclear why the Trump campaign wouldn't release internal polls showing Trump winning if they had them.
Ultimately, Trump cannot win reelection if he relies only on Republican voters, something even GOP operatives have admitted to the New York Times.
"He is losing, and if he doesn't change course, both in terms of the substance of what he is discussing and the way that he approaches the American people, then he will lose," Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a former Trump adviser, said Sunday on ABC's "This Week."
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
