Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh ripped Fox News’s polls on Sunday, saying they’re “always one of the worst polls.”
“No offense, the Fox News poll is always one of the worst, and it’s notoriously bad. Your main pollster is always working for failed Democrat candidates and was, in fact, Tom Steyer’s pollster, and you got one college professor in there so you can call it bipartisan, but it’s a Democrat polling firm, and it’s a big one, and so we’ve always discounted Fox News’s polls,” he said.
@TimMurtaugh on why the polling at Fox News is terrible and why we haven’t ever given much thought to those polls.
Their pollster has been paid over $3million this cycle by DEMOCRATS who lost… in their party’s primaries pic.twitter.com/LXDx5UsGLW
— Sam (@SunshineSt8Sam) November 1, 2020
[PREDICT TUESDAY’S WINNER WITH THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER’S INTERACTIVE ELECTORAL MAP]
In its most recent national poll, Fox News found Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden up 8 points with 52% to President Trump’s 44%. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 points.
Fox News’s polls are conducted by Beacon Research and Shaw & Company Research. Based on “historical accuracy and methodology of each firm’s polls,” FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings give Fox News’s polls an A- rating and 1.4 bias rating in favor of Democrats.
Murtaugh added that polls in recent days show Biden losing his lead in key states, such as Pennsylvania.
“What you see in a lot of the state polls from different organizations are a definite narrowing of the race and the president actually taking leads in a lot of the key states — Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona — polls in recent days showing the president ahead in those states, and it’s what we’ve always seen in ours,” he said.
While polls from Morning Consult, Trafalgar, and Civiqs show Trump gaining ground in battleground states, they’ve done little to shift most pollsters’ predictions. FiveThirtyEight’s odds for Biden taking Pennsylvania increased following the release of those polls, showing Biden maintaining a 5-point lead in the state.
With just one day before Election Day, Murtaugh emphasized that incoming ballot data is more important than the latest polls.
“We’re at the point in the race where polls are not what we look at,” Murtaugh said. “We’re looking at actual votes now. People have cast their votes in the tens of millions. We can look at that data and see where those votes are coming from, whether they’re Democrats or Republicans, and we know that during the early voting period, the Democrats opened up a pretty good lead, which is what everyone expected. But then, every single day that has passed, the president has chipped away at that lead, and the Democrats have absolutely not hit the mark.”
At least 92 million people have already voted, according to the United States Election Project — 68% of the number of votes cast in the 2016 election.
