President Donald Trump’s campaign is demanding CNN retract and apologize for a recent poll that showed him well behind presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
The demand, coming in the form of a cease and desist letter to CNN President Jeff Zucker, was immediately rejected by the network.
“We stand by our poll,” said Matt Dornic, a CNN spokesman.
The CNN poll conducted by SSRS and released on Monday shows Trump trailing the former vice president by 14 points, 55%-41%, among registered voters. It also finds the President’s approval rating at 38% — his worst mark since January 2019, and roughly on par with approval ratings for one-term Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush at this point in their reelection years — and his disapproval rating at 57%.
Soon after the poll was released, Trump tweeted that he had hired Republican pollster McLaughlin & Associates to “analyze” the CNN poll and others, “which I felt were FAKE based on the incredible enthusiasm we are receiving.” McLaughlin ranks as one of the least accurate pollsters in the industry, as measured by FiveThirtyEight.
Several other polls released over the past few weeks — including polls by ABC News/Washington Post, Monmouth University, NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist College, NBC News/Wall Street Journal, Quinnipiac University and Fox News — also show Biden well ahead of Trump. These polls, averaged with the CNN poll, find Biden up by double digits, a result well outside any margin of error.
In the letter to Zucker, the Trump campaign argued that the CNN poll is “designed to mislead American voters through a biased questionnaire and skewed sampling.”
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