Week after week, month after month, Donald Trump has led nearly every poll. And it hasn't been close.
From New Hampshire, to South Carolina — and nationwide, the Manhattan mogul has commanded strong leads across a heap of surveys, despite — or perhaps because of — intemperate remarks that would doom anyone else. Now, after Trump's widely denounced call to bar Muslims from entering the U.S., the puzzled political world is again on the edge of its collective seat, wondering: Is this what finally brings him down?
It's an existential question: Poll numbers are, unlike perhaps any candidate in history, central to Trump's pitch to voters. In his telephone and in-person morning talk show interviews and his evening rallies, not to mention on his hyperactive Twitter account, he rarely lets an opportunity escape without mentioning his titanic standing. "Wow, my poll numbers have just been announced and have gone through the roof!" Trump tweeted Thursday morning.
And yet, unlike rivals who spend thousands on expensive gurus and polling firms, Trump doesn't even employ a pollster, as he often boasts. "My pollster's me," he said at an Iowa rally last week.
One Trump insider likens Trump's obsession with his poll numbers to a TV executive's hunger for ratings: "It’s a barometer of success."
But the polls also serve a legitimizing function for a candidate who has been dismissed all along as unelectable, this person added. "Strategically, it’s made his candidacy look as if it were feasible to primary voters."
And in an indication of the symbiotic relationship between Trump and those who cover him, sometimes Trump even knows the results of his national polling before the embargo lifts.
