Trump Campaign Spokesman: Polls are “Designed to Suppress Enthusiasm”

In an interview with Breitbart this weekend, Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said it was important not to put too much stock in the mainstream media’s presidential polls showing Biden out in front. Murtaugh said that these polls are carefully weighted and designed to depress enthusiasm for the president, and that was the entire point of putting them out.

“They are trying to create a narrative, and these polls are designed — this is why they are released and published — they’re designed to create headlines, and they are actively trying to suppress the enthusiasm of President Trump’s voters,” Murtaugh said. “It’s evident that these polls are only designed to do that one thing that they’re aiming for.”

Murtaugh said you only needed to look at the demographic breakdown of the polls to see the tricks being pulled by the mainstream media. He said recent polls from CNN and Quinnipiac were perfect exampled because their samples only included 24% of respondents who identify as Republican voters.

“Twenty-four percent – less than a quarter of the country,” he marveled. “That compares to Republican turnout according to exit polls in both 2016 and 2018 of 33 percent, so they’re undersampling Republicans by 9 points in that poll. They just no longer exist? They just wiped out more than a quarter of Republicans and said, ‘OK, here’s the poll.’ Well of course it shows that Joe Biden is ahead. But we know that there is enormous enthusiasm on the president’s side.”

Murtaugh said it would be more predictive to look at the enthusiasm of voters during the primaries, where Trump ran all-but-unopposed. Despite there being almost no chance that the president wouldn’t be nominated by the party, Republicans still turned out in massive numbers to cast their vote for him.

“He doubled and tripled the votes that Barack Obama got, forget about the votes that George W. Bush got in his reelection. President Trump destroyed Barack Obama’s number,” he said.

Murtaugh said that the enthusiasm gap was obvious even in the slanted polls from CNN and others.

“In these polls routinely, President Trump has an enthusiasm advantage of somewhere around 40 points,” he observed. “40 points, 40 percent more people say that they’re voting for Trump because of Trump, versus voting for Biden because of Biden. That’s an enormous indicator, and there’s just no excitement on that side. No one thinks that Joe Biden is a good candidate.”

Ordinarily, we would take Murtaugh’s pleas with a grain of salt. A presidential candidate casting doubts about polls that show him behind? Okay, sure. In this case, however, who can forget the lessons of 2016? Was there a single poll in the entire country that had Trump winning on election day? Anywhere? And yet, win he did.

We also have the lessons of the last four years, which show us that the media is willing to do anything and everything to destroy President Trump. Fudging the polls would actually rank pretty low in the list of ethical sins they’ve committed since this president took the oath of office.

Even so, if we said we were extremely confident about Trump’s chances right now…we’d be lying. Hopefully, once Uncle Joe comes out of his basement and actually gets some proper scrutiny, things will turn around. Until that happens, we’re going to remain cautiously pessimistic.

After all, with the way this year is going…