Pence and Trump have formed a unified front, dismissing the wide swath of polls showing Biden leading their reelection bid by as much as double digits in the 2020 presidential election race. Their response to the poor numbers this week is clear: The polls are “fake” and biased toward Democratic candidates. Pence told Breitbart News that the energy he witnessed on the campaign trail in 2016 is even greater today and the president stands a greater chance of winning 2020 than he did four years ago.
Polls this past week from ABC News, The Washington Post, Fox News and Marquette all show Biden with at least five to six percentage point leads over Trump should the November 3 election be held today.
“I think polling is broken in America,” Pence told Breitbart in Onalaska, Wisconsin, where is campaigning in the swing state that Trump won in 2016. “I didn’t believe the polls in 2016, and I don’t believe the polls in 2020.”
“I think there is greater enthusiasm today than there was four years ago,” the vice president continued. “And I really believe it’s because who he is, what he’s done, and what he’s been willing to endure. He’s never stopped fighting.”
Pence highlighted how nearly ever major poll heading into Trump’s 2016 presidential election with Hillary Clinton showed her as the clear favorite to win that November. Pollsters and political analysts since then have pointed to everything from “nonresponse bias” to landline phone calling as reasons behind Trump’s seemingly unforeseen victory that year.
Trump this week expressed a nearly identical sentiment to Pence during a Fox News Sunday interview. Anchor Chris Wallace noted that Biden leads Trump by eight points overall and by 21 points in terms of race relations. The president immediately pounced on the latest Fox News poll as “fake.”
“I’m not losing, because those are fake polls. They were fake in 2016, and now they’re even more fake. The polls were much worse in 2016,” the president said, claiming that pollsters only reach out to a small percentage of Republican voters. “I have other polls that put me leading, and we have polls where I’m leading. I have a poll where we’re leading in every swing state. All the Fox polls…they’re among the worst. They got it all wrong in 2016.”
Pence recalled to Breitbart News this week a 2016 interview with NBC News anchor Chuck Todd in which Trump and Pence’s chances of winning were viewed in an almost laughable context. In the interview, Pence said campaign trail enthusiasm for Trump was all the evidence he needed to show they were going to defeat Clinton.
Todd began that interview by declaring, “Donald Trump and Mike Pence have no clear path to 270 electoral votes. They are, in effect, throwing spaghetti at the wall, trying to find some combination of new states like Minnesota that will get them to 270 electoral votes.”
Newsweek reached out to both the Pence and Biden campaign offices for additional remarks Monday afternoon.
