Pollster John McLaughlin explained he got a call from President Trump after the Washington Post/ABC poll distributed a survey revealing him trailing former Vice President Biden by 17 points in the battleground state of Wisconsin.
The Associated Press called the race for Biden, who led The president by a razor-thin 49.6 percent to 49 percent, or about 20,000 votes.
McLaughlin was conducting polls for the Trump campaign in the Badger State.
“The president called me and said, `Could this be true?,'” McLaughlin said on the radio Wednesday.
“No,” McLaughlin said he told the president. “This is their strategy. They want to suppress your vote.”
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McLaughlin alleged misleading polls undercounting Trump’s support were hurting because most of his voters intended to vote in person on Election Day. Most of Biden’s followers voted early.
Still, a projected record-shattering 160 million Americans voted in the 2020 elections amid the COVID19 pandemic. Approximately two-thirds of eligible voters cast ballots, the highest turnout since 2000.
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His survey of 1,000 voters nationally published Thursday revealed that 58 percent of Biden supporters voted early while 62 percent of Trump followers voted on Election Day.
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But McLaughlin’s own internal polls for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin showed a tight race, within the sampling edge of mistake — or a dead heat.
McLaughlin said the Washington Post-ABC poll predicted that Republicans would cover 26 percent of the Election Day voter turnout, while the Trump campaign proposed GOP voters accounting for 34 of the turnout, based on 2016 exit surveys. That poll under-sampled Republican voters by eight points, he said.
“That’s voter suppression. If you don’t think your candidate can win, why vote?,” the Trump pollster said Thursday when asked regarding his earlier remarks.
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Trump even recounted his conversation with McLaughlin at a rally in North Carolina on Monday.
“When you’re down by 17, people say, `I just can’t waste my time. I’m not going to stand in line,'” Trump said to followers.
He said, “isn’t that sad” that the media pollsters were operating against him.
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“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” Trump said as he took the podium in the White House briefing room to give a brief announcement full of falsehoods.
The Republican president falsely insisted that election officials in charge of counting in those states, as well as Arizona and Nevada, are “run in all cases by Democrats.”
“We were winning in all of the key locations by a lot and our numbers started miraculously getting whittled away in secret and they wouldn’t allow it legally,” he said.
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