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Kellyanne Conway Says National Polls Are ‘Colossal Waste of Money’

Kellyanne Conway Says National Polls Are ‘Colossal Waste of Money’

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump’s campaign plans to have more than 50 of its surrogates on hand for his rally Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his first in more than three months.

By bringing so many allies, Trump’s campaign is resuming a strategy it employed at rallies earlier this year, before the coronavirus pandemic forced an end to large gatherings. The president’s last campaign rally was March 2 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The surrogates on Saturday include some of Oklahoma’s Republican congressional delegation, including Senators Jim Inhofe and James Lankford. Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican and staunch Trump ally, will also attend.

The campaign has also invited members of its outreach effort toward Black voters, such as Darrell Scott and social media personalities Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, known as Diamond and Silk. Trump has been criticized for his response to the demonstrations that have swept the U.S. since the death in police custody of a handcuffed, unarmed Black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis on May 25.

The rally was originally scheduled for June 19, known as Juneteenth, a holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 when Union soldiers read the Emancipation Proclamation to slaves in Texas, freeing them. And Tulsa was the site of one of the deadliest racial riots almost exactly 99 years ago, when a white mob looted and burned a Black business district known as Greenwood.

Conway Says Polls Are ‘Colossal Waste of Money’ (12:51 p.m.)

Kellyanne Conway said Wednesday she’s not worried about national polls showing President Donald Trump trailing Democratic nominee Joe Biden by more than 8 points because country-wide polls are “a colossal waste of money” in a presidential campaign.

Conway, the Republican pollster and Trump campaign manager who’s now a top White House aide, said she never conducted national polls when running the Trump campaign, and swing state polls show a closer race.

“I think what you’re going to see in many of these swing states is what we saw in 2016, which is Biden and Trump in relatively close proximity to each other, under 50% in most of these swing states,” she told reporters at the White House.

Biden is over 50% support in Michigan and Florida but undecided voters are still a factor in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. Trump has become increasingly frustrated with national polls showing him losing, even having a campaign lawyer demand that CNN retract a poll showing him behind by 14 points because he said it overestimated turnout by Democrats.

Kellyanne Conway Says National Polls Are ‘Colossal Waste of Money’

Conway said people sometimes mislead pollsters when asked about about whether they plan to vote. They say, “yes and I pay my taxes and I go to church every Wednesday and Sunday. I do sit-ups every morning. Vote? I’ll be there,” she said. -- Jennifer Jacobs

Coming up:

President Donald Trump is planning to resume big rallies with an event on Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Democratic National Convention is scheduled for the week beginning Aug. 17 in Milwaukee, while the Republicans are slated to meet a week later with events in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Jacksonville, Florida.

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