President Donald Trump consistently refuses to acknowledge even the possibility that he’s losing the presidential race to Democratic presidential pick Joe Biden. He sounds like he’s hoping to essentially coast to victory on the fumes of his self-delusion. On Thursday, following the previous day’s release of new polling data from Fox News that showed him losing to Biden by big margins in key states, Trump (predictably) melted down on Twitter. He claimed that Fox’s polls “are, as in the past, Fake News.” There is, of course, not a shred of evidence for Trump’s belligerent claims that the Fox polling is “Fake.” It’s very real.
He tweeted:
‘@FoxNews Polls are, as in the past, Fake News. They have been from the beginning, way off in 2016. Get a new pollster. I believe we are leading BIG! Do you notice that any time Fake News Suppression Polls are put out, like @FoxNews , the Stock Market goes DOWN. We are going to WIN!’
.@FoxNews Polls are, as in the past, Fake News. They have been from the beginning, way off in 2016. Get a new pollster. I believe we are leading BIG!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2020
Do you notice that any time Fake News Suppression Polls are put out, like @FoxNews, the Stock Market goes DOWN. We are going to WIN!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2020
Trump talks as if him believing that he’s winning “big” somehow has any relationship to whether or not he’s actually winning. It doesn’t. That’s not how reality works, although the self-aggrandizement-addicted president seems to consistently miss this fact.
In the Fox polling, Biden had significant leading margins in Arizona, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, all of which Trump won in 2016. In Arizona, Fox had Biden up by 9 percent, while in North Carolina and Wisconsin, Fox had Biden up by 4 percent and 8 percent, respectively. In those latter two states, Biden garnered 50 percent of the support, making his lead almost insurmountable. No number of undecided voters could possibly swing the election to Trump if Biden were to secure 50.1 percent of the vote in any given state.
NEW Fox News Polls
ARIZONA
Joe Biden 49%
Donald Trump 40%NORTH CAROLINA
Joe Biden 50%
Donald Trump 46%WISCONSIN
Joe Biden 50%
Donald Trump 42%https://t.co/gm9zAAh2Mh— Pat Ward (@WardDPatrick) September 2, 2020
It’s worth noting — polls weren’t actually that far off the mark in 2016, no matter any common consensus. The final average of national-level polls from RealClearPolitics had Clinton with a 3.2 percent lead, and she ended up winning in the national popular vote by 2.1 percent. The problem is that the lower the leading candidate’s national popular vote margin is, the higher the chance is for the losing candidate to somehow eke out a victory in the electoral college, since they may still be able to win enough individual states to put them over the top.
Check out Twitter’s response to Trump below:
