Trump's favourite pollster puts him 12 points behind Joe Biden
Donald Trump has been hit by a rash of polls showing Joe Biden pulling ahead of him – and now, a new survey by Scott Rasmussen for website Just the News shows him falling behind Mr Biden nationally by 12 points.
According to Mr Rasmussen’s results, Mr Biden would win 48 per cent of the national vote to Mr Trump’s 36 if there election were held today. It would worry any sitting president to poll at less than 40 per cent at this point in the election, but Mr Trump is especially invested in his own numbers, which he regularly shows off on Twitter.
The latest poll will be particularly galling for the president given it comes from Mr Rasmussen, founder of Rasmussen Reports. The company is one of the only pollsters whose results Mr Trump routinely cites when celebrating his own numbers. frequently writing that it was an outlier in predicting he would win the 2016 election.
However, the company has previously been criticised for its methodology, which some say tends to produce Republican-tilted results, and the data analysis website FiveThirtyEight has rated it only C+ for quality.
And while the company’s prediction for that election was indeed one of the closest among the major pollsters, it did not in fact predict Mr Trump would win the popular vote – and nor did he, instead losing it to Hillary Clinton by one point.
Mr Biden’s numbers, meanwhile, are holding up steadily across numerous polls, and not just nationally. Recent surveys show him almost tying Mr Trump in Iowa, which Mrs Clinton lost badly, and trouncing the president in Michigan, one of Mr Trump’s most important and narrowest victories.
Across the board, Mr Biden is now polling slightly better against Mr Trump than Mrs Clinton was at this distance from election day. However, the comparison is somewhat muddled by the advent of the coronavirus pandemic and knock-on recession and the relatively early and smooth end to the Democratic primary; at this point in 2016, Bernie Sanders had not yet conceded the race.
The Trump campaign recently demanded CNN retract a poll which showed the president losing to Mr Biden by 14 points, threatening the network with legal action for “a stunt and a phony poll to cause voter suppression, stifle momentum and enthusiasm for the president, and present a false view generally of the actual support across America for the president.”
CNN refused the campaign’s demand, its executive vice president pointing out that “to the extent we have received legal threats from political leaders in the past, they have typically come from countries like Venezuela”.
Mr Trump has many times used Twitter to trumpet his supposedly near-unanimous approval rating among Republicans, raising the number over the years without ever providing a source. In recent months, he has consistently proclaimed it to be 96 per cent – even as his rating among the American electorate writ large sits somewhere at 55 per cent disapproval.
