With spectacularly bad timing, an email from the Donald Trump campaign went out Wednesday morning titled “Momentum.” To make a long story short, the Trump campaign seems to think, based on nonexistent polls, that it is on the brink of a victory that would be the equivalent of having no women in America vote.

“Lucy, as one of the most dedicated grassroots leaders in the country you know, momentum matters,” the email I received from Trump's son Eric began (addressed to my dog, who is the registered recipient of such emails in my house). “And right now all the momentum is on our side.”

Let's … pause right there.

There is momentum in this race! It is not on Trump's side.


Perhaps I'm just propping up Hillary Clinton? Eric Trump seems to think so.

“But the mainstream media are doing everything they can to prop up Crooked Hillary and downplay the incredible Donald Trump surge happening across the nation,” the email reads. “We need your help to continue funding our aggressive ad blitzes and our campaign’s get-out-the-vote operation. We’re making huge gains against Crooked Hillary that you can see for yourself.”

Then there was this map.

electionmap-jfc-wave

This map is insane. It's insane. It's not at all clear what this is supposed to represent, but I assure you that current polling does not show Trump winning Maine and Ohio without question, much less flipping states such as New Hampshire, Michigan and Minnesota from light red to dark red. He's not even turning them from dark blue to light blue. This is like saying that you are the strongest person in the world, which anyone can see for themselves, and then passing along as evidence a Photoshopped image of your head superimposed on a weightlifter's body.

The New York Times's Emma Roller noticed something else interesting about the map:

Which is true. On Tuesday, FiveThirtyEight gamed out electoral maps if only men or if only women voted. This is the only-men map.

silver-electionupdate-menvoted

Precisely the same. So apparently Eric Trump thinks that the campaign is on the brink of an electoral result that excludes women from voting. This seems like the wrong sort of message to send right now. Of all of the possible maps to land on, it had to be that one?

Perhaps Trump is misunderstanding the new poll from The Atlantic and PRRI on Tuesday that showed women moving 23 points toward Clinton in a week. Just because women may not vote for you does not mean they are not voting, Eric.

Eric Trump then puts a bit of icing on the cake. “We’re not just winning national polls like L.A. Times/USC and Rasmussen, we’re beating back the increasingly desperate Dems in the battleground states, too,” he writes.

For the first time in precisely a month, Trump is no longer leading in the usually-Trump-friendly Los Angeles Times poll. The most recent national Rasmussen poll shows Clinton leading by four points.

If this is the level of fact-checking that goes into email solicitations, no wonder the campaign needs money.