Fact check: Trump falsely claims every poll says he won the debate

Former President Donald Trump has returned to a time-honored tradition of his: citing junk online polls to claim he was the clear winner of a presidential debate that scientific polls found he lost.

Former President Donald Trump has returned to a time-honored tradition of his: citing junk online polls to claim he was the clear winner of a presidential debate that scientific polls found he lost. He did it in 2016 after his debates against Hillary Clinton. He did it in 2020 after he debated Joe Biden. And he did it again on Wednesday after facing off against Vice President Kamala Harris the previous night. He wrote on social media on Wednesday afternoon: “Every Poll has us WINNING, in one case, 92-8, so why would I do a Rematch?” “We won the debate according to every poll — every single poll, I think,” Trump told reporters later in the afternoon. Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. As of Thursday morning, every major scientific poll about the debate — every poll that used random sampling techniques to try to obtain a representative picture of US public opinion — had found that Harris won. The polls in which most respondents said Trump won were unscientific junk polls — open questions posted online — that allowed an unlimited number of people to click and respond no matter how old they are or what country they live in, making the results useless as a measure of US public opinion. Here are the results of three scientific polls about the debate from established nonpartisan pollsters. The first two were released before Trump made his Wednesday claims that every poll showed him winning.