Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on Tuesday said public polls are oversampling Democrats and that Donald Trump is probably doing better than 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney among both Democrats and independents.
“I do think the oversampling of Democrats is apparent,” Mr. Giuliani said on “Fox and Friends.” “Now, the pollsters have an explanation for that, but they’re oversampling by about 10 percent Democrats.”
“[I] think if I got that sample down to about 5 percent oversampling for Democrats, you’d have pretty much…an even race,” said Mr. Giuliani, who has been one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters.
Mr. Giuliani did say Mr. Trump is performing better in the Investor’s Business Daily tracking poll, though Hillary Clinton pulled ahead of Mr. Trump by 1 point in the IBD survey released Tuesday.
“They make assumptions as to what they think the turnout’s going to be,” he said. “If the turnout turns [out] to be different than the sample, you just get a Brexit.”
“First of all, you’re using a 2012 model for a 2016, which is a totally different kind of election,” he said.
“Trump is probably not getting the traditional percentage of Republican vote,” he said. “But he’s probably doing a lot better among Democratic and independent voters than Romney did.”
Many Republicans said public polls in 2012 that showed President Obama with an edge over Mr. Romney were wrong, and were stunned on election night at Mr. Obama’s easier-than-expected victory.
Mr. Giuliani also hinted there could be some surprises in store for the closing stretch of the campaign.
“We got a couple of surprises left,” he said. “Surprises in the way that we’re going to campaign to get our message out there maybe in a little bit of a different way.”
“And you’ll see, and I think it’ll be enormously effective,” he said.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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