President Trump’s new campaign manager Bill Stepien said Friday that the president’s support is underrepresented in public polls and that surveys showing Joe Biden leading by big margins do not accurately reflect the state of the race.
In a Zoom presentation with reporters, Stepien painted a rosy picture of the president’s standing in the race and dismissed surveys showing Biden building up a big lead.
The campaign manager said his analysis of public polls found that they routinely under-sample Republican voters. He also pointed to voter registration trends in six battleground states that he said found a growing number of Republican voters and shrinking number of Democratic voters over the past decade.
Stepien pointed to polling errors from 2016, when most of the battleground surveys and national polls showed Democrat Hillary Clinton winning on Election Day.
“These trends are going to go unnoticed until election night, when we’re right and they’re wrong,” Stepien said.
Trump trails Biden by 9 points nationally in the RealClearPolitics average with more than 100 days to go before the election.
Biden leads in the six core battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina and Arizona, according to the RealClearPolitics average.
In four of those states Biden leads by 6 points or more, which is outside the margin of error. Polls also show Biden running close to Trump in traditionally red states, such as Ohio, Texas, Georgia and Iowa.
Republicans are growing worried that Trump is headed for a sizable defeat that will also cost the GOP their majority in the Senate.
But Stepien said the campaign’s internal polls reflect a different reality and that he expects a close election in the battleground states, with opportunities for Trump in Minnesota, New Hampshire, Nevada and Maine.
“We know here at our headquarters what our internal numbers say and it’s why we exude the quiet confidence in our plan and in our mission,” Stepien said.
“This will be a knockdown dragout fight to the very end,” he added. “I spent election night 2016, not in the hotel ballroom, but rather in election headquarters sending recount lawyers to states because the races were so tight in so many places. I expect our campaign will be doing the same exact thing in just about 100 days.”