Poll-Truther Jesse Watters Hangs His Hat On One CNBC Poll Showing Race Tightening In Battleground States

By Heather — August 2, 2020

Fox's Jesse Watters did his best to soothe Trump's fragile ego by downplaying the results of the latest presidential polls, while hanging his hat on one by CNBC showing some tightening in many of the key battleground states.

Here's how Watters began his opening monologue this Saturday:

You can feel the momentum shift in the presidential race. It showed up in the polls too in key battleground states. Take a look at t his screen. See they show a consistent shift across the board to the president.

Which was followed by him citing the results of this CNBC poll:

Forget about the national polls. It’s all about the battlegrounds anyway. Most pollsters are undersampling Republicans as high as 10 points. They do that just to depress turnout. Don’t fall for it.

And just for a little perspective, Hillary was beating Trump in every single battleground state going into the 2016 election. What happened? Hillary lost every single battleground state.

That seems to be a common theme from all of Trump's surrogates and his propagandists in the media like Watters, who have been downplaying the national polls for weeks now, and accusing them of weighting their polls too heavily for Democrats.

What Watters failed to note is that even in the CNBC poll he cited, Trump's strong disapproval ratings are terrible, and Fox's own polls of the battleground states are terrible for Trump as well. I wonder if Watters believes his own network is also undersampling Republicans as he accused the other pollsters of doing?

And just this morning, Politico published this report on Trump's prospects in Pennsylvania: ‘Hating Joe Biden doesn’t juice up their base’: Key swing state slips away from Trump:

Senior citizens and suburban voters are sinking President Donald Trump’s campaign across the country. But here in Pennsylvania — home to one of the largest populations of residents age 65 or older and where suburbanites comprise more than half of the electorate — their defection to Joe Biden is hurting Trump even more acutely.

It’s a very big problem in a swing state that’s central to his Rust Belt path to victory. Four years ago, Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate since 1988 to carry Pennsylvania, in part by winning older and suburban voters, as well as blue-collar white workers in ancestrally Democratic areas. Now, with less than 100 days till Election Day, surveys show those voters are eyeing something different yet again.

Joe Biden has an overall early lead in the state of 6 percentage points, according to RealClearPolitics’ polling average, and has led Trump in all 12 public polls released since the beginning of June.

Here is the RCP poll average in the battleground states that Watters claims are now showing a "momentum shift" for Trump:

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