Trump embraces CNN poll showing him closing in on Biden, but recent surveys show ex-VP ahead
President Donald Trump on Monday touted a new CNN poll released Sunday that showed he had surged to within 4 percentage points of Joe Biden, but two other recent polls showed the former vice president maintaining a much larger lead, which experts said underscores the importance of not depending on any one survey in trying to gauge the state of the race.
The CNN poll released Sunday found Biden leading Trump 50%-46% among registered voters, within the survey's margin of error. That represented a major shift from CNN's last national poll on the race, which found Biden up 55%-41%.
Trump pointed to the poll as evidence of the enthusiasm for his reelection during an interview on "Fox & Friends" ahead of his trip to Wisconsin, where he predicted he would emerge
"I was told every lawn has a Trump sign on it practically out there, and there are no Biden signs that anybody saw anywhere," Trump said, adding that he saw "much more spirit" in his supporters than he did in 2016.
"Crazy CNN – as bad as they are – I guess there was a poll that I was 14 down, and I picked up 10 in the last month," Trump said. "That's the crazy thing."
Trump did not mention that he had slammed the June poll as "fake," or that his campaign sent CNN a cease and desist letter demanding it retract the survey and apologize.
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Other polls released this week continued to show Biden with a sizable lead. On Sunday, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found Biden leading Trump 50%-41% among registered voters and a CBS News/YouGov poll found Biden up 52%-42%. An ABC News/Washington Post poll released Monday found Biden up 53%-41%.
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, said the polls that had Biden with a double-digit lead were "probably too high and CNN's was almost certainly too low."
Sabato bemoaned some of the headlines since Sunday that claimed the race had tightened based solely on the CNN poll. Such outliers underscore the value of looking at a range of polls, rather than being alarmed or encouraged by one poll, he said.
For example, CNN anchor Jake Tapper tweeted Monday that CNN's "poll of polls," which averages the six most recent polls conducted by telephone, found Biden leading 51%-42%.
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A look at the RealClearPolitics polling average, which now gives Biden a 7.7-point edge, has tightened somewhat since the end of June, when it climbed over 10 points, but has been relatively stable since May.
Nate Silver, whose site FiveThirtyEight similarly tracks polling averages, tweeted that after factoring in Sunday and Monday's polls, Biden's lead was "similar to or very slightly higher than the past few weeks."
"Is the race tightening? I don't know," Silver said, describing the numbers as "on the fringe between what you'd consider real movement versus noise."
Is the race tightening? I don't know. Biden peaked in our average at 9.6 points at various times in late June and early July. Our averages are pretty smart, but a 1.2-point shift is sort of on the fringe between what you'd consider real movement versus noise.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) August 17, 2020
"I don't believe a lot of these polls, as I've always said," Trump campaign press secretary Hogan Gidley said on Fox News when asked about the CNN poll that showed a tight race.
Gidley said he did not trust pollsters' methodology because they had not changed it since the 2016 election when they predicted a victory for Hillary Clinton.
"They were wrong then, and they're wrong now," Gidley said.
"We feel pretty good about where we are inside the Trump campaign, no question about it," he added. But he cautioned that he expected Biden and his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris would see an "eight to 10 point bump" from this week's Democratic National Convention.
The 2016 election showed that too much reliance on polling averages can also be misleading and that it was important not to dismiss outliers out of hand, Sabato said.
"Sometimes for a wide variety of reasons, the outliers turn out to be true," he said. And polls can miss the impact of late developments that can push undecided voters in one direction or another at the last minute.
"What I've learned so far this year: Democrats take the polling too seriously, and Republicans don't believe any of it – unless it shows Trump ahead, of course," Sabato said.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 2020 election: Trump touts CNN poll, Biden ahead in recent surveys
