“[T]he Trump campaign has highlighted the meaningless marker of ‘boat parades’ as a measure of voter enthusiasm. The most recent shattered record Mr. Trump has touted online is a heat index. ‘We may have set a record for doing such an interview in the heat,’ Mr. Trump tweeted Tuesday, referring to his outdoor interview with Mr. Wallace. ‘It was 100 degrees, making things very interesting!'” writes Annie Karni in The NY Times.

“Meanwhile, his campaign and his top advisers have echoed his attempts to discredit public polls, in an effort to treat them, dismissively, as an extension of ‘the media.’ The Trump team sent a cease-and-desist letter to CNN after it published a June poll that showed Mr. Trump losing to Mr. Biden. (The network said it stood by its poll.) And in a recent interview with Newsweek, the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is overseeing Mr. Trump’s campaign, dismissed public polling as ‘all b.s.'”

“Privately, aides said, Mr. Trump knows things aren’t looking good for him — he just thinks the public polls are overstating the situation. His campaign does not conduct national polls, but aides have presented him with internal data about battleground states that show a closer race than the public polling numbers. His pollsters tell him regularly that he is in a close race and that there is more polling bias in the news media today than there was four years ago, a claim untethered to any measurable metric. They assure him that his base is still enthusiastically engaged and that the middle that might have been planning to vote for him in March has moved away through no fault of his own.”