
A new NBC poll released on Sunday is the latest to suggest danger for President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, suggesting that he would trail in a hypothetical matchup with several of the top Democratic contenders, including former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
None of this sat well with the President, who, on Monday morning, accused major news outlets of conspiring to create fake "suppression polls" discouraging his supporters from turning out:
Here we go with the Fake Polls. Just like what happened with the Election against Crooked Hillary Clinton. ABC, NBC… https://t.co/F4Zf2gEI8E— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump) 1563202158.0
In 2016, polls were not actually far off the mark — Nate Silver's aggregation of polls forecast Clinton would win the popular vote by about 2 to 2.5 percentage points, which is exactly what happened. On the other hand, several electoral models underestimated Trump's chances of winning because they didn't account well for where those votes were distributed.
The upshot of this is that Trump's claims the media is rigging polls are utterly baseless — but that just because Trump is genuinely down doesn't mean he couldn't pull off another win.