Presidential Election 2020: Trump Fires Pollsters After Leaked Polls Show Democrats Winning

It’s tough being a bearer of bad news in the era of president Donald Trump.

Trump’s campaign for his 2020 re-election bid over the weekend fired pollsters Michael Baselice, Brett Lloyd and Adam Geller over leaked internal campaign polls showing Trump losing badly in key battleground states and in many Red Republican states to Democrats in the 2020 election.

Baselice, president of polling firm, Baselice & Associates Inc., and Geller had both worked for Trump’s 2016 campaign. Lloyd is president and CEO of The Polling Company, the former firm of White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway.

Sources in the Trump campaign cited by media said the firings were more about cooling down an enraged Trump and less about the polling numbers, whose accuracy remains unquestioned.

More Trump pollsters are expected to be fired in light of the humiliation Trump suffered after boasting to George Stephanopoulos on TV that “We are winning in every single state that we’ve polled. We’re winning in Texas very big. We’re winning in Ohio very big. We’re winning in Florida very big.”

Detailed numbers on four of the 17 states polled by the Trump campaign and later leaked to outlets like ABC and NBC proved Trump’s claims to be a lie. NBC News, one of those that broke the Trump internal poll story, showed Trump losing in reliably Red States.

“Trump is also behind the former vice president in Iowa by 7 points, in North Carolina by 8 points, in Virginia by 17 points, in Ohio by 1 point, in Georgia by 6 points, in Minnesota by 14 points, and in Maine by 15 points,” said NBC News.

The internal polls also show Trump trailing Joe Biden, the Democrat presidential frontrunner, in key battleground states like Michigan and Wisconsin.

The existence of the 17-state survey was first reported by media weeks ago but NBC News was the first with detailed data taken from the internal surveys that proved Trump losing in a number of states. When revealed, the leaked internal polls infuriated Trump.

Trump is reported to have yelled at several campaign officials and insisted, without offering proof, the internal poll numbers they had are wrong. Trump also claimed his own campaign’s numbers don’t accurately reflect how he thinks he’s polling nationwide.

Sources in Trump’s campaign said Trump has become obsessed with poll numbers and now demands regular updates or newer polls.

Campaign officials did an about face and have oddly spent the last few days telling the media their own polling numbers are wrong but without revealing what the correct polling numbers are.

"It's incorrect polling," Trump told Fox News in an interview on June 14. "Yes, it's incorrect."

Trump will launch his re-election bid in Orlando on Tuesday night and is expected to boast of his great polling numbers that show him easily winning re-election in November 2020.