Survey Says: Trump Misleads on Debate Performances

Railing against a Fox News guest who said Donald Trump won the presidency despite poor debate performances, Trump held up a series of opt-in online surveys to misleadingly claim that “polls” showed he “won every single debate.” Scientific polls showed otherwise.

In an extended riff that lasted more than 10 minutes during a rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on Feb. 20, Trump took issue with comments made by Real Clear Politics Associate Editor A.B. Stoddard, who cautioned viewers not to count out Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg even though the former New York City mayor looked “uncoachable” and committed “many blunders” in the Democratic debate on Feb. 19.

“I think that Donald Trump had disastrous debate performances. Many answers were so cringeworthy, you just couldn’t even believe he was still standing on the stage, and he’s president,” Stoddard said on Neil Cavuto’s Fox News program on Feb. 20.

Trump initially lashed out on Twitter saying that “I won every one of my debates,” and challenged Stoddard and Cavuto to “[c]heck the polls taken immediately after the debates.”

Trump expounded on that during the rally in Colorado a few hours later, again referencing the segment on Cavuto’s show but refusing to use Stoddard’s name.

“And I said, wait a minute, I won every debate, it’s true,” Trump said. “And we sent them polls. Poll after poll after poll. Not only won them, but I won them by a lot. … I’m just saying, every poll — you you know they do those polls right after 3, 4, 500,000 people. Time magazine.'”

Two minutes later, Dan Scavino, the Trump campaign’s social media manager, handed Trump a stack of news clippings. Trump then spent the next 10 minutes reading numbers from what he called “polls” taken by Time, CNBC, Drudge and others immediately after the debates that indicated the public overwhelmingly believed Trump won all of the primary and general election debates.