Former President Donald Trump said on Thursday that early GOP primary polls are giving him confidence in winning the presidential nomination next year, and he said MAGA anger over the outcome of the 2020 election may be feeding that.
During a media roundtable to discuss his upcoming book, Letters to Trump, he cited a New Hampshire poll released this week that shows him with a huge lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
TRUMP HOLDS 41-POINT LEAD IN NH PRIMARY POLL
“On the political front, you see the polls are really crushing it. We’re doing great in the polls. We’ve just got one from New Hampshire where we’re like 40-something points up on anybody. Overall, we’re way, way up. And a lot of it has taken place over the last two or three weeks,” said Trump.
That poll, from Emerson College Polling, showed Trump with a 41-point lead in the primary and was the latest to suggest that DeSantis may have stalled.
In the discussion, the former president also cited sustained anger from his supporters over the election results in 2020, which he and his MAGA fans have questioned and worse.
Trump bluntly said, “I’m a denier.”
He said, “If you look at the polls, a lot of people think that that election was rigged and stolen. And I happen to be one of them.” He added, “I’m an election denier, and so are, substantially, I would say substantially more than 50% of this country. And I think it’s a much higher number than that. You get a lot of election deniers in this country, and they’re not happy about what happened.”
In the months after the election, half the country agreed. A year after the election, only one-third thought that President Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate.
And in a Rasmussen Reports survey from a few months ago, 55% of voters said they believe the election was riddled with cheating and “likely affected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.”
Trump sounded sympathetic to the current chaos at Fox News and the emails coming out in a lawsuit showing that some hosts who publicly cheered the former president’s doubt about the election privately condemned his election questioning.
SEE THE LATEST POLITICAL NEWS AND BUZZ FROM WASHINGTON SECRETS
“I like the anchors on Fox a lot. I think the anchors are really good. I think they really like me, and I like them, and I think they agree, and I also think people should have the right to express their opinion, especially when they’re anchors,” said Trump.
He also cited campaign data showing that he was receiving better support from social media, especially his Truth Social platform, making TV less relevant in his 2024 bid.
“I made the trip two weeks ago to Ohio. It had 187 million hits, and of the 187 million — I’ve never seen this before. This is a new way of looking at things, I guess. But of the 187 million positive hits, I think it was even higher than that. There were only 30 million hits from television. So, it is a changing landscape or substantially changing landscape,” said the former president.
