Donald Trump on Monday expanded his complaints that the news media is arrayed against his bid for the White House, as he told supporters at two stops in Florida that major polling organizations are purposefully putting out "phony" polls to obscure the strength of his bid for the White House.
"The system is corrupt, rigged and broken," Trump said at a rally in St. Augustine, Florida.
"Without the media, Hillary Clinton would be nothing," Trump said.
Trump went so far as to equate "oversampling" in polls to voter suppression, citing an email released by Wikileaks in which Clinton aides talk about internal polling back in their failed 2008 race for the Democratic nomination.
In an email from January of 2008, Podesta and other aides discuss having the internal Democratic Party pollster named Atlas focus in on certain minority groups with what are known as "oversamples."
Credit: Jamie Dupree
Credit: Jamie Dupree
To Trump and many of his supporters, that was a sign that the Clinton Campaign is pushing pollsters to rig their polls - all to show that Trump is losing.
But that wasn't what people experienced in polling saw:
For Trump though, the email was evidence of pollsters possibly rigging the numbers against him by the media.
"Podesta says that he wants oversamples for our polling in order to maximize what we get out of our media polling," Trump said quoting from the 2008 email.
"It's called voter suppression," Trump added, as he accused the press of rigging the news and the polls about the 2016 race.
"They can wield absolute power over your life and your country," Trump said to cheers.
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