No, Donald, There Is No FiveThirtyEight Poll
Donald Trump late Monday morning posted to Twitter a meme showing Trump speaking before a crowd with “Ohio for Trump” written in lights and a reference to a FiveThirtyEight poll that shows Trump beating Clinton by three points, 46-43.
The only problem is, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight is not a polling company. They do not poll anyone. They are a statistical and predictive research company. They look at everyone’s polls, and make predictions based on that data.
And, unlike RealClearPolitics, Silver also doesn’t perform regular poll averaging, so where Trump got this totally false poll number is anyone’s guess. (See update below.) Like many things that come out of the Trump campaign, it is false.
If you’re asking maybe it’s the average of recent polls, well, no. In fact, FiveThirtyEight shows Clinton with a nearly 60 percent chance of beating Trump in Ohio, so, one more reason this is not factual.
RealClearPolitics, which does poll averaging, shows that in Ohio, Trump has not beaten Clinton in any poll since April, and only twice in the past 13 months, period.
We know never, ever to trust anything that comes from Donald Trump, but this is blatant stupidity.
Disgraceful.
UPDATE:Â
This is truly stunning, so we’ve continued to dig. Talking Points Memo also does poll averaging, and again, we can find no poll there that shows Trump beating Clinton in Ohio 46-43, and in fact, of course, few polls showing him beating Clinton at all.
UPDATE II:
OK, Nate Silver solves this, then throws Trump some shade. Silver says there’s a Reuters/Ipsos poll – again NOT a FiveThirtyEight poll, as those don’t exist – with those numbers:Â
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