President Trump’s campaign manager says polling is no longer reliable, days after a big leak of unflattering internal polling data.
“I just think the country is too complex now to call a couple hundred people and ask them what they think,” Brad Parscale told CBS News hours ahead of Trump’s event Tuesday evening in Orlando, Fla., to officially kick off his 2020 campaign.
“There are so many ways and different people who show up and vote now. The way turnout works now,” he said. “The abilities we have now to turn out voters. The polling can’t understand that. And that’s why the polling was so wrong in 2016. It was 100% wrong. Nobody got it right — not one public poll. The reason why — it’s not 1962 anymore.”
Pres. Trump’s 2020 campaign manager @parscale tells @MajorCBS the country is “too complex now” for polls to be reliable. https://t.co/N5oZfxvFs3 pic.twitter.com/l2dctIcf4J
— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 18, 2019
Leaked Trump campaign polling data from in March, obtained by revealed last week, showed former Vice President Joe Biden beating Trump by wide margins in key states before he declared his candidacy.
They show Biden leading Trump by double-digit margins in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Minnesota, Michigan, Maine, and Virginia. He was also behind Biden by smaller but still significant margins in Iowa, North Carolina, and Georgia. In staunchly Republican Texas, Trump led by just two points.
The leak prompted Trump’s team to decide to fire several of its pollsters.
Parscale shrugged off the numbers and predicted an “electoral landslide” in 2020, including victory in Florida.
“I think even more electoral points than he did last time,” he said.
A total of 270 electoral votes are needed to win the election; Trump took 306 electoral votes in his victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, defying what a majority of pollsters and prognosticators predicted would be a landslide in favor of the Democrat.
