Trump team projects optimism amid dire poll numbers
There's plenty of time to make up ground, campaign chairman Paul Manafort says.
By Nick Gass
08/04/16 10:02 AM EDT
Updated 08/04/16 10:46 AM EDT
After a rocky week, Donald Trump's team projected confidence Thursday, with Trump, his running mate, his staff and his surrogates all sending the same message: The campaign is moving in the right direction — and it’s Hillary Clinton who’s in trouble.
Ben Carson and other surrogates are working to put Trump’s feud with a Gold Star family in the campaign’s rear-view mirror. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is working to mend frayed fences with fellow Republicans after Trump offered a surprise non-endorsement to Paul Ryan ahead of his Tuesday primary. And Trump himself on Wednesday aimed to squash reports of campaign strife with assertions that the campaign is more unified than it has ever been.
Top Trump advisers and aides vowed that the candidate would pivot to more substantial issues like Clinton’s role in the Iranian nuclear deal, and the candidate himself acknowledged as much to a Florida TV station.
But while Trump’s team asserted they were moving in the right direction, a slew of polls — normally one of the GOP nominee’s favorite talking points — suggested otherwise.
Polls in Florida, New Hampshire, Michigan and Pennsylvania — battleground states Trump needs to win to have any chance at winning in November —showed him trailing Clinton by as much as 15 points. Coupled with a national Fox News poll taken in the days following Clinton’s official nomination at the Democratic National Convention last week, the numbers suggested big trouble.
Trump foreshadowed the latest wave of dismal polling on Tuesday, when a CNN/ORC poll taken after the DNC showed him trailing by 7 points. "I think these polls — I don't know — there's something about these polls, there's something phony," Trump said. A day before, Trump similarly expressed a fear that the general election “is going to be rigged.”
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http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/trump-campaign-damage-control-226662
