The Trump campaign's lawyers demanded CNN retract and apologize for a poll that showed Trump 14 points behind Biden

• Lawyers for President Donald Trump's re-election campaign demanded that CNN retract and apologize for an unfavorable poll released Monday that showed Joe Biden leading Trump by 14 points nationally.
• The poll, conducted for CNN by SSRS, surveyed 1,259 registered voters between June 2 and 5. It found that 38% approve of Trump's job performance while 57% disapprove.
• Trump campaign representatives called the survey "a stunt and a phony poll to cause voter suppression," citing a memo from controversial Republican pollster McLaughlin & Associates.
• CNN said they stand by the poll and will not apologize for it or retract it.

Lawyers for President Donald Trump's re-election campaign demanded that CNN retract and apologize for an unfavorable poll released Monday that showed former Vice President Joe Biden leading Trump by 14 percentage points nationally.

The poll, conducted for CNN by SSRS, surveyed 1,259 registered voters by live-caller telephone interviews between June 2 and 5. It found that Trump has an approval rating of 38% and a disapproval rating of 57%, his lowest in over a year.

When respondents were asked who they would vote for if the presidential election were held that day, 55% said they would vote for Biden and 41% would vote for Trump.

Trump, who has frequently railed against polling he dislikes on Twitter, tweeted on Monday that he felt the CNN poll and other recent surveys "were FAKE based on the incredible enthusiasm we are receiving," and said he retained pollster McLaughlin & Associates to "analyze" the poll.

In addition to ordering the review by McLaughlin, which complained about the sampling of the poll respondents and the way some questions were phrased, Trump's campaign further escalated their dissatisfaction with it in a formal cease and desist letter to CNN, the network said on Wednesday.

In the letter sent to CNN, Trump campaign representatives called the survey "a stunt and a phony poll to cause voter suppression, stifle momentum and enthusiasm for the President, and present a false view generally of the actual support across America for the President."

CNN said they stand by the poll and will not apologize for it or retract it.

"To my knowledge, this is the first time in its 40 year history that CNN had been threatened with legal action because an American politician or campaign did not like CNN's polling results," CNN general counsel David Vigilante wrote in response to the Trump campaign.

He added: "To the extent we have received legal threats from political leaders in the past, they have typically come from countries like Venezuela or other regimes where there is little or no respect for a free and independent media," calling the threat "legally baseless" and "a bad-faith attempt by the campaign...to muzzle speech."

While CNN's poll showed Biden leading Trump by a larger margin than many other surveys, it was still in line with a broader trend of Biden leading Trump outside the margin of error in many recent national surveys conducted by credible pollsters, including PBS NewsHour/Marist College, NBC News/Wall Street Journal, Monmouth University, and Fox News.

Nationally, Biden leads Trump by 8 percentage points on average in Real Clear Politics' averaged tracker of general election match-up polls.

Out of 76 national polls in Real Clear Politics' tracker conducted in the last six months that included a hypothetical general election match-up between Biden and Trump, Trump has only led Biden in two.

The last survey from a major pollster that showed Trump and Biden tied was a Fox News poll conducted in early April, and the most recent survey to show Trump leading Biden was an Emerson College poll conducted between February 16 and 18.

The figures CNN's poll reported for Trump's approval rating — 38% approving and 57% disapproving — are also almost exactly in line with Gallup's most recent poll on Trump's approval. The latest Gallup poll, conducted May 28-June 4, found that 39% approve of Trump's job performance while 57% disapprove.

As CNN noted, the "review" the Trump campaign retained McLaughlin to conduct that Trump's lawyers had multiple factual errors and misleading elements itself that misrepresented some aspects of the poll.

While McLaughlin complained that the CNN survey used a sample of registered voters and not likely voters, the vast majority of national polls are currently using a registered voter sample, since as CNN pointed out, it's difficult to accurately predict who is likely or not to vote five months out from an election.

McLaughlin's memo also argued that the survey is a "skewed anti-Trump poll of only 25% Republican" and argued the poll's sample should have been 33% Republican in line with 2016 exit polls.

In CNN's sample, 25% of respondents identified as Republican, 32% as Democrats, and 44% as independents. Those figures are more in line with much more recent data from Gallup showing in an early May survey that showed 28% of Americans identifying as Republican, 37% as independents, and 31% as Democrats.

With a grade of C/D, McLaughlin & Associates is one of the lowest-rated pollsters for accuracy in FiveThirtyEight's pollster ratings.

As New York Magazine and the Washington Post noted earlier this week, McLaughlin has a polling record on behalf of their Republican clients that can only be described as spotty at best.

Former House Majority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor retained McLaughlin as his pollster during his 2014 re-election campaign in Virginia's 7th congressional district.

While McLaughlin's polling showed Cantor up by over 30 points throughout the campaign, he ended up losing to a Tea Party-backed primary challenger, Dave Brat, by over 11 percentage points in a stunning upset of one of the country's most influential politicians.

After that, the National Republican Campaign Committee warned candidates not to retain McLaughlin's services, but some continued to do so.

In the 2018 midterm elections, a McLaughlin & Associates poll conducted in early October 2018 showed Rep. Barbara Comstock leading challenger Jennifer Wexton by one percentage point, 48% to 47%, in Virginia's 10th congressional district. On the day of the November election, however, Wexton defeated Comstock by 12.5 percentage points.

And in Georgia's 7th congressional district in the Atlanta exurbs, a McLaughlin poll also conducted shortly before the election showed Rep. Rob Woodall leading his Democratic challenger Carolyn Bourdeaux by 27 percentage points, 59% to 32%.

In the end, Woodall barely won re-election by just 419 votes and less than a one-percentage-point margin, winning 50.07% of the vote to Bourdeaux's 49.9%.