INQUISITR.COM / News & Politics

Take The Poll: 2016 Presidential Polls Are Wrong, Yes Or No? Vote To Agree Or Disagree With Donald Trump

By Jonathan Vankin
Published on: 07:51 PST, Oct 26, 2016

As the 2016 presidential race enters the final two weeks, polls overwhelmingly show Democrat Hillary Clinton heading toward an easy defeat of her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. But could those polls be wrong? Are the polls “skewed” in favor of Democrats? Donald Trump thinks so.

What do you think? We want your opinion. Do you trust the polls, or are they biased and wrong? Take the Inquisitr Online Poll above to register your view. Simply click the circle to the left of your preferred answer to the question “Are the 2016 Presidential polls wrong?” Then click “Vote” to see the current results.

UPDATE: After two days of voting in the Inquisitr Online Poll, 69 percent of Inquisitr readers say that yes, the polls are wrong and that Donald Trump is really winning the presidential race. Only 22 percent feel that Hillary Clinton’s lead in the polls accurately reflects the true state of the race. There are five days left to vote, and as always, we want your opinion to count.

While Trump trails in 33 of 40 polls released since the first presidential debate on September 26, he led in at least one poll that claims to be among the most accurate available, the Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP tracking poll. Trump held a consistent lead in that poll until Tuesday, when for the first time, IBD/TIPP showed Clinton edging narrowly ahead by a single percentage point, 42 to 41, with the remaining 17 percent divided between Libertarian Gary Johnson, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and “other” as well as undecided voters.

Trump has also led throughout much of the campaign in another tracking poll — that is, a poll which compiles daily results over a lengthy period — the University of Southern California/Dornslife/Los Angeles Times poll. In fact, though Clinton took a brief and rare lead in the USC/L.A. Times poll earlier this week, as of Tuesday Trump had jumped back ahead by 1.1 points, 45.3 to 44.2.

Trump also led in two of four polls taken by Rasmussen Reports that were released in October.

Could the 2016 presidential election be on its way to a surprise finish, with Trump eking out a narrow victory over the heavily favored Clinton? One person who believes that to be the case is Donald Trump himself.

“Wikileaks also shows how (Clinton campaign chairman) John Podesta rigged the polls by oversampling Democrats, a voter suppression technique,” Trump told a rally St. Augustine, Florida, on Monday. “And that’s happening to me all the time. When the polls are even, when they leave them alone and do them properly, I’m leading. But you see these polls, where they’re polling Democrats — ‘how’s Trump doing’ ‘oh he’s down’ — they’re polling Democrats!”

The WikiLeaks reference made by Trump was to a Clinton campaign internal email leaked by the “radical transparency” site, in which an internal campaign pollster made a reference to “oversampling.” But “oversampling” is a common term used by professional pollsters and it refers to a specific technique used by statisticians to gain additional information about a specific group.

Nonetheless, Trump and his supporters have seized on the WikiLeaks email release as evidence that the polls are “rigged” through the Clinton campaign’s collusion with pollsters — though the poll referenced in the leaked email was an internal campaign poll, not a poll released for public consumption.

Trump’s son, Eric Trump, told ABC News recently that he, like his father, rejects the majority of polls as flawed.

“The polls are all over the place,” the 32-year-old Trump scion said. “When I’m on the ground, the amount of love out there is — is incredible. The amount of Democrats that I have coming up to me every single day and saying I’ve been a Democrat my entire life, my entire family is made up of Democrats, we’re coming out and voting for you… I can tell you, we’re getting 90 percent of those votes.”

Former United States House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a prominent Trump supporter, has also said that he believes the polls in the 2016 election are way off the mark.

“I think the polls are wrong,” Gingrich told Fox News last week. “I think they verge on irrelevant and misleading for a lot of different reasons. Nobody can tell you what the turnout is going to be. Nobody can tell you which people are going to be the most motivated.”

What do you believe? Are the polls overall an accurate reflection of the public preference, showing that voters will almost certainly elect Hillary Clinton? Or is Donald Trump right when he says that the polls are completely wrong, and he will land a stunning victory on November 8. Take the poll above on this page to let us know your opinion.

[Featured Image by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]

Share this article: Take The Poll: 2016 Presidential Polls Are Wrong, Yes Or No? Vote To Agree Or Disagree With Donald Trump
More from Inquisitr