With three weeks remaining before Election Day, Donald Trump continues to focus on appeals to far-right voters, including an interview yesterday with right-wing radio host Michael Savage. As the Washington Post reported, Trump sounded optimistic about his candidacy’s chances.
Trump told Savage that he believes he’s actually ahead in the polls, which show him trailing Clinton, and cited “tremendous enthusiasm” and crowd sizes at his rallies as evidence.
Look, when a struggling candidate is asked about the polls, he or she has a standard line that’s been repeated for many years: “The only poll that matters is the one done on Election Day.” Trump, however, looks at the available data and apparently believes “he’s actually ahead in the polls.”That’s plainly untrue.
After a bruising week for Donald Trump amid backlash from the release of a lewd 2005 recording and in-fighting among GOP party leaders, Hillary Clinton now holds a 6-point lead over the Republican nominee, according to the latest NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking Poll.In a four-way match-up, Clinton enjoys 46 percent support this week among likely voters, while Trump drops a single percentage point to 40 percent support. Gary Johnson holds on to 8 percent support and Jill Stein has 4 percent support.
In a head-to-head match-up, the same poll puts Clinton’s lead at eight points.And given the latest survey results, that’s actually some of the more encouraging data for the Republican nominee. A CBS News poll released last night found Trump trailing by nine points in a four-way contest and 11 points in a head-to-head race.Also yesterday, a national Monmouth University poll found Clinton ahead by 12 points in a four-way race and 9 points in a two-way contest.According to the Huffington Post‘s polling aggregator, Clinton’s average advantage across all polls is now eight points — her largest lead since shortly after the parties’ national conventions.Looking at the latest state polls, CNN released a batch of results yesterday that found Clinton with narrow leads in North Carolina and Nevada, but Trump up by four in Ohio.Quinnipiac, meanwhile, found Clinton leading by eight in Colorado, six in Pennsylvania, and four in Florida. In Ohio, the pollster found the two tied.Trump and his team may be pleased by its showing in the Buckeye State, but given the rest of the picture, Ohio won’t be nearly enough to get the GOP candidate to the White House.Trump “believes he’s actually ahead in the polls”? What he believes and what the polls actually show are two very different things.
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."