Donald Trump‘s re-election team have cut ties with several pollsters after survey results were leaked to the press indicating the president would lose to his Democratic rivals in four key battleground states in 2020.
The internal findings for 17 states, recorded in March, revealed Trump would lose to Joe Biden in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida. They painted a bleak picture for the incumbent, with reliable Midwestern states and even the Republican stronghold of Georgia looking shaky for him next year.
Increasingly angered by reporting on the polls, Trump told George Stephanopoulos of ABC last week: “Those polls don’t exist… I just had a meeting with somebody that’s a pollster and I’m winning everywhere, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Campaign manager Brad Parscale has now acted – dropping three of the campaign’s five pollsters: Adam Geller, Michael Baselice and Brett Lloyd (president and CEO of the Polling Company, once home to embattled Trump counsellor Kellyanne Conway).
Two other pollsters, Tony Fabrizio and John McLaughlin, will remain with the campaign. Oddly, it was Fabrizio who carried out the offending poll, according to The New York Times.
Before shooting his messengers, Parscale admitted the results were accurate but sought to dismiss their significance, declaring in a statement on Friday: “These leaked numbers are ancient, in campaign terms, from months-old polling that began in March before two major events had occurred: the release of the summary of the Mueller report exonerating the president, and the beginning of the Democrat candidates defining themselves with their far-left policy message.”
