Trump claims polling shows him ahead in every state polled

WA SHINGTON» President Donald Trump bristled Wednesday at reports that his re-election campaign’s internal polling shows him trailing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in several key states and claimed without evidence that those polls actually show him leading in every state his campaign has surveyed.

“We have great internal polling,” Trump said during an Oval Office meeting with visiting Polish President Andrzej Duda. “We are winning in every single state that we polled.”

Trump claimed to have “very big” leads in Texas, Ohio and Florida, among other states.

Recent public polling has shown Trump trailing Biden, a former vice president, by as much as double digits in some battleground states, including Michigan and Pennsylvania.

And a Quinnipiac poll released this week showed the president trailing six 2020 Democratic White House hopefuls in national matchups. Biden’s lead was the largest — at 13 percentage points.

Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said Trump was referencing an update to a poll of 17 states that the campaign commissioned in March.

“In this new data, the president has a lead in every state we polled,” Murtaugh said in an email.

Murtaugh did not respond to a request to share the data or say which states were surveyed.

In recent days, Trump has lashed out at The New York Times in the wake of a Times report that stated he was briefed on a 17-state poll conducted by his campaign pollster, Tony Fabrizio, that showed him trailing Biden in many of the states he needed to win in 2020.