With less than two weeks until Election Day, Donald Trump is, for the most part, still insisting to his supporters that he’s in the lead.
While he conceded in one radio interview Monday that he was “somewhat behind in the polls,” Trump said the same day that “I really believe we are winning” and claimed that “Democrats are making up phony polls.”
Members of his campaign, though, are openly admitting that the businessman is lagging behind.
Trump’s campaign manager, pollster Kellyanne Conway, also conceded that the GOP nominee was trailing, saying Sunday “we are behind.”
Although Trump says he no longer believes the polls, his internal data apparently mirrors what publicly available surveys are showing.
The campaign’s San Antonio-based research team is spending $100,000 a week on polling and is running simulations of the election, according to Bloomberg Businessweek ― and it’s coming up with results that look like most of the public forecasts, all of which give Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton an 85 percent or higher chance of victory.
“Nate Silver’s results have been similar to ours,” Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital director, told Bloomberg, “except they lag by a week or two because he’s relying on public polls.”
Silver’s website, FiveThirtyEight, currently gives Clinton a nearly 7-point national lead and shows her on track to win about 338 electoral votes to Trump’s 199.
HuffPost Pollster’s average currently shows Trump about 8 points behind in a national head-to-head race, with Clinton holding substantial leads in states like Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Virginia and a smaller edge in battlegrounds such as Nevada and Florida.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misstated which candidate holds leads in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Virginia.
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