OPINION: A CNN poll published Wednesday shows President Donald Trump leading by seven points over Joe Biden in battleground states. But the liberal network was rather hush-hush regarding its own findings.

While Biden led overall by a small margin, and that margin against the president was smaller than the margin his immediate two predecessors were at during this point of their successful reelection campaigns, President Trump was leading in the key battleground states of Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

Only one CNN show on Wednesday, and none on Thursday, mentioned that poll of voters indicating 52 percent favor Trump, as opposed to 45 percent for Biden, in those battleground states.

Once the gold standard of conservative publications —though now suspect in conservative circles because of their relatively recent anti-Trump stance— the National Review and analyst Kyle Smith picked apart the CNN reports by quoting from one of their broadcasts: “But remember 2016. We pick presidents state by state. Look at the horse race in the states that CNN designates as presidential battlegrounds. Take a peek. The president leads in those battleground states, 52 percent to 45 percent. Be careful not to invest too much in any one poll, especially in the middle of a pandemic.”

Notice the last line. And remember that this is their own poll. But they ask viewers “not to invest too much” in it.

Smith: “CNN anchor John King then began a panel discussion, warning a Politico reporter and CNN’s Jeff Zeleny not to overinvest in any one poll before asking their opinions. Only after all of this stuff did we learn that CNN has a new poll out, under the headline, ‘CNN Poll: Biden tops Trump nationwide, but battlegrounds tilt Trump.’”

Smith continued, saying, “Polls are expensive, news organizations tend to hype them breathlessly to generate headlines in rival media outlets…and politics is one of CNN’s core topics. Yet CNN seemed oddly unenthused about its own poll. The story to which the homepage linked doesn’t mention that Trump had never scored higher in a CNN poll.”

Never scored higher in a CNN poll, and still the liberal network ignored the poll. They instead tried to spin it for Biden by saying, “Given the small sample size in that subset of voters, it is difficult to determine with certainty whether the movement is significant or a fluke of random sampling. Nationally, Biden holds a lead over Trump among voters age 65 and older, a group which has been tilted Republican in recent presidential elections.”

A fluke? Small sample size? Random sampling? So, are they admitting their own polling is unreliable? During my amusingly storied career as a political consultant I spent time as a political pollster with a New York city firm. We never, but never, privately or publicly undercut the results of our own surveys. If we did, why would someone ever hire us to conduct a poll for them? Thus for CNN to do this is tacitly acknowledging that there are some things that mean more to them than even the bottom line. And those things are protecting Democrats, lying to their own viewers, and hurting Donald Trump.

It’s not like we didn’t know this. But we can give a small bit of thanks to CNN for reminding us on a daily basis.

This opinion piece was written by David Kamioner on May 15, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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