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And Now for Some Conspiracy Trutherism About Trump's Sinking Poll Numbers

Team Trump, which lives and dies by poll numbers, suddenly hates polls.



BY JACK HOLMES
AUG 18, 2016

Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

Any commander will tell you that when it's all bad news, you've got to create some good news to feed the troops. You've got to keep spirits up. So now that Donald Trump is sinking in virtually all the polls, it's just about time for him to say they're all rigged and biased.

Which he has—often.

But he's not the only one. Olivia Nuzzi of The Daily Beast reported this week on the emerging cottage industry of Poll Trutherism in the Age of Trump, and now it looks like Fox News wants a cut of the action.

Here's Eric Bolling of The Five—the best show on TV—breaking down why polling doesn't matter because rallies:

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a47...ate=081916

Now, we could go to town all day on the logic of this. (No, the Trump campaign's rally attendance stats are not a better judge of the electorate than scientific polling from dozens of independent sources.

No, the people who show up at rallies are not a representative sample of the electorate. No, drawing 10,000 people to a rally in Connecticut does not mean you will win the majority of Connecticut's 2,821,247 voting-age citizens, no matter how motivated your rally-goers are.)

The more pressing issue here is that this was clearly a cheap scam, as poor Dana Perino—forced to endure this for an entire segment—tried to point out when she said that what Bolling was doing "is a disservice to [Trump's] supporters."

Really, the aim here was to convince people the race is still close so they'll keep watching, and so they'll be extra angry if Trump does eventually lose big—and keep watching Fox.

In fact, they discuss a similar phenomenon from 2012 in the segment, as The New York Times' Jonathan Martin pointed out on Twitter:

Jonathan Martin
✔ @jmartNYT
Wow: at 120 mark 1 fox personality reminds another that they lied to viewers in 2012 about the polls being wrong

Four years ago, Fox insisted the polling was wrong and Romney was going to win all the way to the bitter end. That bitter end, of course, was Karl Rove's on-air meltdown over a few mythical counties in Ohio, when Megyn Kelly journeyed down the hall to the pollsters' office just to shut him down:

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a47...ate=081916

It might not have gone so well for Karl, but everyone else made it out the other side. It's the new business model: Just say, "LOL, nothing matters" over and over and hope they stay tuned in.

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