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Trump Isn’t Tweeting About The Polls Anymore

In the runup to the Republican presidential primary, Donald Trump tweeted about polls. Like … a lot. It made sense: Trump was winning in the polls, and the Trump brand is all about winning. But as “all of them” now show Trump losing, we wondered — being rather poll-obsessed ourselves — whether Trump would still be interested in informing his Twitter followers about the state of the race.

Not so much.

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MehtaEnten-TRUMP-TWITTER-1

As you can tell from the chart, Trump rarely tweets1 about polls these days. Indeed, he’s done so only four times in the past 30 days. During the same period in the primary season — as far out from the Iowa caucuses as we are from Election Day now — he tweeted about polls 103 times. Now, Trump has been reduced to sharing surveys from pollsters such as Zogby Analytics, a firm that earned a C- in our pollster ratings and that has a spotty history.

One more interesting note: Trump also stopped tweeting about the polls when he was winning primaries. It could be that Trump stopped feeling the need to tell everyone he was winning polls when he was winning actual votes. Whatever the reason, the difference between the number of tweets Trump has devoted to polling now and the number at a comparable point in the primary season is pretty striking.

Footnotes

  1. We isolated tweets from Aug. 1, 2015, through Aug. 17, 2016, containing “poll,” “pct,” “percent,” “point,” “%” or “lead,” as well as derivations of those terms. We then manually removed the tweets unrelated to polls or polling, which left us with 448 tweets. These tweets are available to download on GitHub. ^

Dhrumil Mehta is a database journalist at FiveThirtyEight focusing on politics.

Harry Enten is a senior political writer and analyst for FiveThirtyEight.

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