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Donald Trump has found a new conspiracy theory to explain his tanking poll numbers
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."
Trump hinged his claim on an email published by WikiLeaks, in which someone in an email chain with Podesta apparently recommended "oversamples for our polling" so the campaign could "maximize what we get out of our media polling." Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall explained just how far off Trump's interpretation of the email actually is:
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]
Moreover, Marshall pointed out there seems to be some confusion about the word "oversampling." Contrary to Trump's claim that "oversampling" skews a poll's results, the "over-sample" is actually not included in the poll's overall results; instead, over-polling a certain demographic is generally used as a way for pollsters to get "statistically significant data on that group," Marshall wrote.
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Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Looks like Trump might need to keep searching for evidence to explain his polling problems — or then again, he could always revisit his admission from earlier in the day that he is, in fact, "somewhat behind in the polls."
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