Donald Trump has found a new conspiracy theory to explain his tanking poll numbers

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published 24 October 2016

Donald Trump claimed at a rally in Florida on Monday that when the polls are done "properly," he's actually in the lead. The problem, Trump explained, is that many polls are "rigged" because of Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta, who Trump says pushes for "oversampling Democrats." "It's called voter suppression," Trump said, "because people will say, 'Oh, gee, Trump's down.' Well, folks, we're winning."

You'll note for starters that that the email is from 2008 and Podesta is neither the sender nor the recipient. But that's just a footnote. More importantly, what Tom Matzzie is talking about is the campaign/DNC's own polls. Campaigns do extensive, very high quality polling to understand the state of the race and devise strategies for winning. These are not public polls. So they can't affect media polls and they can't have anything to do with voter suppression. [Talking Points Memo]