NEW YORK, Nov 02 (New York Times): When President Donald Trump talks about polling, his focus is very much on survey-takers that he thinks are good for him. Polls that show him trailing Joe Biden - virtually all national polls - are simply "fake news."
The president's blinkered view has created something of an alternate universe, one not governed by polling averages or independent analysis but by declarative statements that, at times, feel as if they are coming out of nowhere.
Recently, Trump proclaimed on Twitter that he was "winning BIG in all of the polls that matter."
Such polls seem to boil down to Rasmussen Reports, which consistently - and in isolation - has a rosier picture for the president nationally than other surveys do, and the Trafalgar Group, which has had better numbers for Trump in Midwestern states.
His choose-your-own-adventure approach to polling that has shown little understanding of data science, and his pronouncements have come as his advisers are trying to take in serious polling and data analysis to make sense of what the electorate voting in 2020 will look like.
It has been a hallmark of Trump's public commentary since the first time he ran for president that he treats polling as rigged against him if it isn't favorable for him.
Despite his campaign spending $10 million over the last two years on some of the most sophisticated data available, the president prefers to use what he sees on the news. And he treats voter support as a mystical, rather than a mathematical, proposition.
Some of Trump's advisers believe there is a wellspring of "shy" or "hidden" Trump voters - predominantly whites without college educations in rural areas - who are either not candid with pollsters about their choice for president, or aren't responsive to pollsters at all.
Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, gave his own view of how polling works to Fox News, trumpeting "big data modeling" over old-fashioned phone calling.
"I speak to all my state directors," said Kushner, who has positioned himself as the leader of the Trump campaign, although he is not in fact the campaign manager, adding, "I do believe that polling with phones to people is an obsolete method, especially in the era of cancel culture. You've got a lot of snake oil salesmen who have kind of been in the business for a long time and they do this."
He concluded, "They were all completely wrong last time, and they didn't make any modifications going forward."
That is not quite true: Although many state polls proved very wrong in 2016, the national polls that projected Hillary Clinton narrowly winning the most votes were close to the mark, and many polling outfits did make modifications, weighting, for instance, for educational backgrounds.
Complaining that polls are "skewed" against Republicans has been a vocal pastime of Republican candidates for several election cycles, reaching a high pitch in 2012, when Mitt Romney was the party's presidential nominee.
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