The demand, coming in the form of a cease and desist letter to CNN President Jeff Zucker that contained numerous incorrect and misleading claims, was immediately rejected by the network.
“We stand by our poll,” said Matt Dornic, a CNN spokesman.
In the letter to Zucker, the Trump campaign argued that the CNN poll is “designed to mislead American voters through a biased questionnaire and skewed sampling.”
“It’s a stunt and a phony poll to cause voter suppression, stifle momentum and enthusiasm for the President, and present a false view generally of the actual support across America for the President,” read the letter, signed by the Trump campaign’s senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis and chief operating officer Michael Glassner.
The campaign formally requested that CNN retract the poll and publish a “full, fair, and conspicuous retraction, apology, and clarification to correct its misleading conclusions.”
David Vigilante, CNN’s executive vice president and general counsel, told the campaign that its “allegations and demands are rejected in their entirety.”
Misleading claims
The campaign’s letter, which heavily cites findings by McLaughlin, makes several incorrect and misleading claims.
“It’s a poll of 1,259 adults — not even registered voters, let alone likely voters,” the letter says, citing a McLaughlin memo from earlier this week.
While it’s accurate that 1,259 adults were reached on landlines or cell phones by a live interviewer for the survey, the 14-point margin by which Trump is trailing Biden came from a question posed only to 1,125 registered voters. It’s typical for polling to sample registered voters rather than likely ones at this stage of the race, as it’s difficult to project whether voters will participate in an election that is five months away. CNN, as do most public pollsters, typically reports results from likely voters around Labor Day.
It should be noted that in CNN’s poll, Biden expands his lead among those who are most (i.e. extremely) enthusiastic to vote.
Among the entire sample, 32% identified themselves in CNN’s poll as Democrats, 25% identified themselves as Republicans, and 44% described themselves as independents or belonging to another party. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. It is 3.6 points among registered voters.
And the survey comes amid an especially turbulent time in Trump’s presidency, including the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, outrage and concern over race relations in the wake of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of police officers, and the US officially entering a recession.
McLaughlin has also argued that the poll unfairly includes “questions on issues including race relations, not job creation, which could have biased the poll further,” though CNN’s survey does ask registered voters who would better handle the economy (Trump leads 51% to Biden’s 46%) and was conducted at the height of the Floyd protests.
This story has been updated to include additional response from CNN.