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President Donald Trump on Monday sounded upbeat about the state of his re-election campaign, as he talked up his team’s internal polls and dismissed surveys that put Democratic challenger Joe Biden ahead of him.
“We have polls that show me leading in almost every swing state and substantially in other states by even more than I won in ’16,” Trump said during a news conference in North Carolina.
The president’s comments during a trip to the Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies Innovation Center in Morrisville, N.C., are similar to what his new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, said on Friday. Stepien said pollsters “keep getting it wrong” as he projected confidence about the state of the White House race.
In a RealClearPolitics average of polls focused on top swing states, Biden leads Trump by 6.2 percentage points as of Monday.
“There’s more spirit now than there’s ever been for my campaign, and that includes 2016,” the president also said on Monday. “There’s more today because what we’ve done nobody’s ever done before.”
Trump cited accomplishments such as cuts to taxes and regulations, the creation of the Space Force and “saving tens of millions of jobs in energy XLE, +0.10%. ” But meanwhile, a poll out Monday has found that more Americans say the country is heading in the wrong direction than at any previous point in Trump’s presidency. Approval for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has fallen to a new low, too.
During his remarks, Trump talked up progress on possible coronavirus vaccines, including Moderna Inc.’s MRNA, +9.15% candidate that has started Phase 3 trials. He said: “This is the fastest a vaccine for a novel pathogen has ever gone.”
