Pollsters may have predicted his doom and pundits may have finished writing their political obituaries, but Donald Trump is working overtime to convince his supporters that he is actually going to pull off a surprise victory on November 8.
Even as a RealClearPolitics average of 10 different polls continues to put Hillary Clinton well ahead with a 5 to 6 per cent lead over him on a daily basis, Trump asks crowds flocking to his rallies to ignore the “phony pulls out by phony media”. Most of these “skewed polls”, he says, are based on “oversampling” of Democrats.
Not relishing the polls and reportage from the “dishonest” media outlets, Trump has launched his own live news shows on his Facebook page. In the inaugural stream on Monday, Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, a pollster in her own right, declared: “let me just say unequivocally: We will win.” Trump, she claimed, is “up or within the margin of error” in six or seven of the nine major swing States – Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire etc. “If we maintain our leads in those six states, we can reliably claim 266 electoral votes. Hillary can claim 193,” Conway asserted in disregard of several polls saying it’s advantage Clinton in these States.
Trump himself kept up his attacks on the media. “What they do is they show these phony polls where they look at Democrats, and it’s heavily weighted with Democrats. And then they’ll put on a poll where we’re not winning, and everybody says, ‘Oh, they’re not winning’,” he told a roundtable with Florida farmers on Monday before addressing two big rallies in the key battleground State.
“Phony polls are part of the crooked system, part of the rigged system that I’ve been talking about since I entered the race,” Trump said, adding the motivation of these polls is to “try and suppress” his vote.
Faced with what every pollster maintains sees as a very narrow path at best for him to eke out a win, Trump asserted: “We’re up in Ohio. We’re up in Iowa. We’re doing great in North Carolina. I think we’re doing great in Florida…. We’re winning this race.”
Trump is clearly riled by the ABC News tracking poll that gave Clinton a 12 per cent lead (50-38) on Sunday. In contrast, a CNN/ORC poll on Monday put Clinton’s lead at 5 per cent (49-44). The only poll that Trump seemed to relish is the daily tracker from Investors Business Daily/TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, which gave him 1 to 2 per cent lead for five of the last seven days, before trending marginally in favour of Clinton on Tuesday (42-41).
The Trump campaign’s Facebook broadcast, hosted by his senior adviser Boris Epshteyn and a few others, has been projected as an answer to the mainstream media. “We all know how strong the left wing media bias is. This is us delivering our message to voters,” Epshteyn said.
There has been speculation lately that Trump, in the event of losing the White House race, may launch his own media outfit, called 'Trump TV'.