Put trend lines in the list of things Donald Trump doesn’t understand as well as he thinks. Trump just told the GOP’s friendliest of TV shows, Fox News’ Fox and Friends, that recent voter opinion polls prove this election is finally turning his way. In Trump’s words:
“If you look at the most recent polls, I think things are turning. I think they’re turning rather rapidly.”
Indeed, polling aggregate sites all show the presidential race narrowing, with the gap between the Republican nominee and Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, somewhat smaller than during the immediate aftermath of the Democratic National Convention. But that, unsurprisingly, only tells a small part of the story.
HuffPost Pollster’s combined aggregate of major polls shows Clinton leading with 46.8 percent of the vote to Trump’s 39.5 percent, a 7.3 percent split. In contrast, the aggregate score on Aug. 8 showed Clinton leading with 47.7 percent to Donald Trump’s 39.7 percent, an 8 point divide.
So Clinton’s lead has gone down, but so has Trump’s share of the total vote, based on the polls. That Trump still can’t break 40 percent is hardly good news for the GOP nominee.
But that’s HuffPost, right? Well, the conservative RealClearPolitics (RCP), also a highly respected aggregator of polls, shows Clinton with lead of 5.5 percent. The biggest difference there comes from the inclusion of a USC Dornsife/LA Times poll. This poll actually shows Trump leading Clinton 45 percent to 44 percent in its RCP Average.
Incidentally, the USC Dornsife/LA Times poll has consistently shown Trump performing better than other polls have shown, and pollsters there acknowledge using a somewhat different methodology than others. From the LA Times:
“Finally, some analysts think the Daybreak poll is slightly tilted toward the Republican side because of how it accounts for the way people voted in the last election.”
Trump predictably has cited the USC/Dornsife poll a great deal, but also has been known to dismiss polls that showed him trailing Clinton by wide margins. Of course, pro-Trump pundit Eric Bolling last week infamously suggested that media ignore the polls because of the fact Trump draws bigger crowds to rally than Clinton does.
This logic was actually too much for the rest of the Fox News panel to take and sent former George W. Bush spox, Dana Perino, into a Twitter storm about the disservice of dismissing polls with bad news.
But I will not lie to you about the state of this race. I won't do it. No amount of peer pressure digital or otherwise can move me.
— Dana Perino (@DanaPerino) August 18, 2016
Just a week later, the Donald Trump camp sees reason to trust the polls again. But even an optimistic analysis of all the polls show that the race is tightening, but far from close. Clinton’s lead in most polls still exceeds the margin of error.
Also, looking at polls in battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia, and states where the RCP Average gives Clinton greater than a 9 percentage point edge, show Trump losing, and losing YUGE.
Trump’s statement comes at the 9:35 mark:
