Campaign big admits Trump lags
Faced with fresh polling showing Donald Trump down 12 points nationally, his campaign manager Sunday did something her boss hates to do — acknowledged that they are losing.
“We are behind,” Kellyanne Conway admitted on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The GOP nominee routinely brushes off negative polling as untrustworthy, but Conway said Hillary Clinton does have an edge, grudgingly crediting the Democrat’s lead to “$66 million in advertising” and an impressive list of surrogates, including President and Michelle Obama.
“She has a former president, happens to be her husband, campaigning for her. The current president and first lady, vice president, all much more popular than she can hope to be,” Conway said.
“Our advantage is that Donald Trump is just going to continue to take the case directly to the people.”
Trump will fight back with a stepped-up campaign schedule in the final two weeks, hitting “three to four states” a day, Conway added on supermarket mogul John Catsimatidis’ AM 970 radio show.
He’d even press Clinton for a fourth debate.
“I think Donald Trump would challenge Hillary Clinton to another debate for a very simple reason: Unless you’re a money donor, you are not going to have much access to Hillary Clinton out on the stump now,” Conway told Catsimatidis on Sunday.
But a new face-off is not in the cards — the independent Commission on Presidential Debates decided the debate schedule and locations a year in advance.
Clinton opened up her widest lead yet in the latest ABC News/ Washington Post survey — 50 to 38 percent — as voters were largely turned off by the brash billionaire’s comments about women and his unwillingness to accept the election’s outcome.
“No candidate has ever come back from this far behind,” ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos said on ABC’s “This Week.”
The poll found 69 percent of likely voters don’t like the way Trump responded to accusations of sexual assault. He has called the allegations by 11 women false, implied some of his accusers weren’t attractive enough to warrant his attention, and promised Saturday to sue them.
Voters surveyed were also turned off by Trump’s assertion that the election is “rigged” against him. Just 29 percent support his reluctance to say whether he’d accept a loss, and 59 percent don’t believe the Nov. 8 presidential election is fixed.
Clinton has a 20-point lead among women (55-35 percent) and a commanding advantage with college-educated, white women (62-30 percent) who have largely condemned Trump’s allegedly sexist behavior. Clinton has a slim edge with men (44-41 percent), while Trump has the advantage with white voters (47-43 percent).
The telephone poll was conducted Oct. 20-22 in English and Spanish among a random national sample of 874 likely voters. The poll has margin of error of 3.5 percent.
Another survey out Sunday shows Clinton making gains in the traditional red state of Texas, where she trails Trump by just three points, 46-43 percent, according to the CBS News battleground tracker poll.
Clinton holds a narrow lead in the big battleground prize of Florida, 46-43 percent.
More than eight in 10 Florida and Texas Republicans say that voter fraud is widespread. Of those, more than eight in 10 believe the fraud will cost Trump the White House.