CNN put out a new poll on Thursday that shows President Trump is crushing presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in key battleground states — but the liberal “news” network downplayed that finding to the point of hilarity.
“CNN Poll: Biden tops Trump nationwide, but battlegrounds tilt Trump,” said the headline.
“Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s lead over President Donald Trump now stands at five points, but Trump has an edge in the critical battleground states that could decide the electoral college, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.
“Could”? Uh, does. The popular vote across the country doesn’t matter. What decides election is the Electoral College vote (remember when all the pollsters said Hillary Clinton was going to bash Trump in 2016, but he won the EC vote 304-227? Yeah, we do, too).
“In the new poll, 51% of registered voters nationwide back Biden, while 46% say they prefer Trump, while in the battlegrounds, 52% favor Trump and 45% Biden,” said the piece.
Huh. The battleground states. Aren’t those the states that decide every presidential election?
So what were the battleground states in the CNN poll? Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico and North Carolina.
Is that all?
That’s 15 states. In Electoral College votes:
- Arizona, 11
- Colorado, 9
- Florida, 29
- Georgia, 16
- Maine, 4
- Michigan, 16
- Minnesota, 10
- Nevada, 6
- New Hampshire, 4
- New Mexico, 5
- North Carolina, 15
- Ohio, 18
- Pennsylvania, 20
- Virginia, 13
- and Wisconsin, 10
That’s 186 electoral votes, well more than half of the 270 needed to win the White House.
Of course, no one is saying that Trump will win all those states, but it’s just interesting that CNN downplayed the findings of its own poll.
“A review of transcripts found that only one CNN program on Wednesday mentioned the poll of registered voters that indicating 52 percent favor Trump, as opposed to 45 percent for Biden, in key battleground states,” Fox News reported.
“CNN Buries Its Own Poll Results on Trump’s Favorability. Guess Why,” Kyle Smith wrote at National Review.
CNN seemed oddly unenthused about its own poll. And the story to which the homepage linked doesn’t mention that Trump had never scored higher in a CNN poll. True, there are lots of noisy data in the piece, most of which cut against Trump. But on the other hand the single most surprising and hence most newsworthy detail of the poll was that Trump holds a seven-point lead over Biden in the battleground states. The CNN story doesn’t even tell us what that figure is — seven points seems like a pretty big number — and downplays its own finding by noting, “Given the small sample size in that subset of voters, it is difficult to determine with certainty whether the movement is significant or a fluke of random sampling.”
“The story to which the homepage linked doesn’t mention that Trump had never scored higher in a CNN poll,” Smith wrote.
CNN also buried another key finding: THe youth ain’t flocking toward the 77-year-old marblemouthed Biden.
“Though other recent polling has shown some signs of concern for Biden among younger voters and strength among older ones, few have pegged the race as this close among younger voters,” CNN wrote. “The results suggest that younger voters in the battleground states are tilted in favor of Trump, a stark change from the last CNN poll in which battleground voters were analyzed in March[.]”
CNN conducted its poll between May 7-10 with 1,112 adults, including 1,001 registered voters and 583 voters in those 15 battleground states. The margin of error is 3.7 points.
