Donald Trump’s campaign appears to be in a panic over a slew of recent polls showing Joe Biden expanding his lead nationally and in a swath of key battleground states.
According to Dave Catanese of McClatchy, the Trump campaign team presented a slideshow to reporters explaining that the polls are skewed and 2020 will turn out just like 2016.
The presentation attacked more than a dozen polls released in recent weeks, claiming they’re “undersampling” GOP turnout.
Trump campaign lists all the polls it believes is *undersampling* Republican turnout >> pic.twitter.com/avwZvZEllV
— Dave Catanese (@davecatanese) July 24, 2020
CNN’s Harry Enten blows a hole in this argument, however, pointing out that “current polls have the same relative partisan makeup as earlier this year when the race was tighter and as the accurate final national 2016 polls.”
Nate Cohn of the New York Times also pointed out on Saturday that recent NY Times/Siena polls were actually better for the GOP than 2016 exits polls.
Feeling left out. But our battleground polls were D+1, same as October, and they were better for GOP than the exits among 2016 voters. https://t.co/gRpQILqXsU
— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) July 25, 2020
In other words, Biden’s increasing lead over Trump isn’t the result of a Democratic-leaning sampling change on the part of pollsters. It’s simply a reflection of voters abandoning the president.
This is what a losing campaign looks like
Regardless of whether Joe Biden’s current polling lead holds over the next 100 days, the Trump campaign is behaving like an operation that knows its headed toward defeat.
In the same way that innocent men don’t brazenly obstruct investigations, winning campaigns don’t devote time and resources to whining about public opinion polls – especially to the extent that Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien did on Friday.
To be sure, there are still over 100 days until the presidential election. As we’ve seen throughout this year, events are moving rapidly. There is still plenty of time for the campaign to be upended by another major news development.
But this campaign is entering its final phase. At the moment, Biden’s advantage is clearer and stronger than Hillary Clinton’s appeared to be four years ago.
No matter how much Donald Trump and his flailing campaign wish it to be true, 2016 is not 2020 and Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton.
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Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.