Everyone piles on after Donald Trump’s Rasmussen disaster

| 1:05 pm EDT August 3, 2020
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

When you start falling far behind in the polls, you can approach it in one of two legitimate ways. You can acknowledge that you’re losing, but keep doing things the same way, and hope that the public eventually ends up seeing things your way. Or you can start doing some things differently, in the hope of reaching more people.

Then there’s Donald Trump’s way of handling his terrible poll numbers, which is to simply pretend he’s winning. For instance, Trump tweeted this today: “96% Approval Rating in the Republican Party. 50% in new Rasmussen Poll (higher than Obama at this point in time). Thank you!” There are a couple major problems here.

First, Trump keeps claiming that he has an approval rating in the mid-nineties within his own party – but no such poll exists. Various major polls say his approval rating within his party is in the seventies or eighties, which might sound high but is actually quite low, and is in fact too low to get reelected. Considering the disparity in the numbers, it’s not even possible that Trump is quoting an internal campaign poll. Instead it’s clear that his handlers are feeding him imaginary positive numbers and he’s swallowing them.

Second, Rasmussen is the least respected major poll in the country. It’s nearly always slanted in favor of Republicans. But even the latest Rasmussen poll says that Donald Trump is six points behind Joe Biden. So if Trump is telling us that we should take the Rasmussen poll seriously, then Trump just unwittingly announced that he’s losing. What an idiot!