Week after week, month after month, Donald Trump has led nearly every poll. And it hasn't been close.Actually, we already know: Trump's Muslim comments have given him a fresh boost in public opinion, and have freaked out the Democrats, especially Hillary Clinton.
From New Hampshire, to South Carolina — and nationwide, the Manhattan mogul has commanded strong leads across a heap of surveys, despite — or perhaps because of — intemperate remarks that would doom anyone else. Now, after Trump's widely denounced call to bar Muslims from entering the U.S., the puzzled political world is again on the edge of its collective seat, wondering: Is this what finally brings him down?
It's an existential question: Poll numbers are, unlike perhaps any candidate in history, central to Trump's pitch to voters. In his telephone and in-person morning talk show interviews and his evening rallies, not to mention on his hyperactive Twitter account, he rarely lets an opportunity escape without mentioning his titanic standing. "Wow, my poll numbers have just been announced and have gone through the roof!" Trump tweeted Thursday morning.
And yet, unlike rivals who spend thousands on expensive gurus and polling firms, Trump doesn't even employ a pollster, as he often boasts. "My pollster's me," he said at an Iowa rally last week.
One Trump insider likens Trump's obsession with his poll numbers to a TV executive's hunger for ratings: "It’s a barometer of success."
But the polls also serve a legitimizing function for a candidate who has been dismissed all along as unelectable, this person added. "Strategically, it’s made his candidacy look as if it were feasible to primary voters."
And in an indication of the symbiotic relationship between Trump and those who cover him, sometimes Trump even knows the results of his national polling before the embargo lifts.
During an interview with CBS' "Face the Nation" aired Oct. 11, the show featured a segment taped the previous Friday, Oct. 9, in which host John Dickerson shared with Trump that 60 percent of registered voters did not find him honest and trustworthy, among other results collected between Oct. 4 and 8.
Pollsters have watched Trump's fixation with their work with a mixture of fascination and revulsion.
"He is given a big assist by the media when it persists in focusing on the 'horse race' in [a] way that overstates its importance, such as talking about who is in third versus fourth place, even though the polling error suggests there may be no discernible difference between the two," said Monmouth University polling director Patrick Murray. "As someone who Trump has hailed as either a hero or a goat depending on our poll numbers that day, it’s fascinating to watch. Trump saw an opening in the marketplace and decided to harness a pre-existing inclination, especially at this early stage, to reduce elections to popularity contests."
Through the course of his campaign, Trump has also touted polls with shakier methodology, such as unscientific post-debate polls on Drudge Report and online surveys with brief response windows, trashing those showing a name other than Trump in the No. 1 spot.
In a late October CBS News/New York Times poll, for example, Trump trailed Ben Carson by 4 points nationally, days after a separate ABC News/Washington Post survey "that nobody wanted to use" showed him up by 10 points on Carson. Trump groused in an interview with MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Nov. 5 that the media covered the CBS/NYT poll "bigger than Benghazi."
"And I never really understood it, but that's the way the world of politics works, I guess," he said.
Trump doles out praise for outlets as well. After a favorable poll release from CNN last week, for instance, he tweeted his thanks to the network and political team for "very professional reporting."
It remains to be seen what effect, if any, the businessman's proposed Muslim entry ban will have on his polling nationally and in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. But betting that Trump would fade after outlandish comments has proven foolish before...
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