Donald Trump Campaign Demands Retraction Of CNN Poll Showing President Losing To Joe Biden
Donald Trump’s campaign demanded that CNN retract its recent poll that showed the president losing to former Vice President Joe Biden by a wide margin. CNN reported that the campaign sent the network a cease and desist letter, which claimed that the poll was “designed to mislead American voters through a biased questionnaire and skewed sampling.”
Among the chief complaints from Team Trump were that pollsters only surveyed 1,259 people, of whom 25 percent were Republican. Of those questioned, 1,125 reported being registered voters, even though McLaughlin & Associates — the firm that Trump hired to analyze the poll — said that it hadn’t surveyed such individuals. Another complaint was that the survey, which was conducted between June 2 and 5, did not take into account the positive jobs report that came out on Friday.
The CNN poll showed Trump losing to Biden by 14 points — 41 percent to 55 percent. The Trump campaign accused the network of trying to suppress voting in November by misleading the public.
“It’s a stunt and a phony poll to cause voter suppression, stifle momentum and enthusiasm for the President, and present a false view generally of the actual support across America for the President,” read the letter, which was signed by Trump campaign senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis and chief operating officer Michael Glassner.
The complaint, which heavily cited the McLaughlin & Associates analysis, contained a number of factual errors, per CNN.
Ultimately, the campaign demanded both a retraction and an apology. It also wanted the network to release a conspicuous correction of the supposedly misleading parts of the poll. However, CNN stood its ground, as executive vice president and general counsel David Vigilante rejected Team Trump’s entire argument.
“To my knowledge, this is the first time in its 40-year history that CNN had been threatened with legal action because an American politician or campaign did not like CNN’s polling results,” Vigilante wrote.
Vigilante noted that any other threats the network received in the past came from countries whose regimes did not value an independent media and freedom of the press.
CNN’s poll is not the only recent one that found Biden leading Trump amid the turmoil caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the civil unrest after George Floyd’s death while in the custody of now-former Minneapolis police officers. Fox News, ABC News, NPR, and NBC News also recently released polls that showed Trump losing to the former vice president, but the margins in those polls were not quite as wide as the one from CNN. However, the average of all recent polls showed that Biden leads Trump by double digits, which is outside of the margin of error.
