At a campaign rally in Tampa on Wednesday, Donald Trump returned to one of his favorite topics of conversation, polling. He hasn’t been talking about his good poll numbers much recently because his poll numbers haven’t been very good. But he singled out a couple of points of data during his Tampa speech that he figured were worth sharing.
“I don’t know if you’ve seen what's happening, but over the last three weeks, the polls with African American folks and Spanish-speaking folks, the Hispanics, Latinos, have gone way up. Way up. They’ve gone way up,” Trump said, to applause. It seemed like it was validation of the time he'd spent over the last week making somewhat awkward appeals to voters in those demographics.
But it’s not, because those numbers are wrong.
The problem almost certainly began with a headline at Trump’s favorite website, Breitbart.com. On the heels of Trump’s speech near Milwaukee last Tuesday, the site ran a story with a headline that would seem to make Trump's case on black voters.
“The Los Angeles Times/USC Dornsife national tracking poll of the presidential campaign picked up a sharp uptick in African-American support for Republican nominee Donald J. Trump, which it now pegs at 14.6 percent,” the story began. “When the ‘Daybreak’ poll began July 10, Trump’s support among black voters was 4.6 percent and he fluctuated between 5.4 percent Aug. 1 and 2.5 percent Aug. 11.”
We wrote about the Times/USC poll on Monday, for the simple reason that its results were consistently more favorable to Trump than most polls. It’s the blue line below, while the average of a number of polls compiled by RealClearPolitics is the yellow one. The Times/USC poll has always been at least 2 points friendlier to Trump -- but it's usually much more favorable than that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/24/donald-trump-is-doing-great-with-black-and-hispanic-voters-now-according-to-polls-that-dont-exist/
