Clinton Campaign Isn’t Worried About Trump’s Poll Numbers—Yet

Campaign manager Robby Mook says to wait until after the Democratic convention to judge whether Trump’s ahead.

Robby Mook, right, is Clinton's campaign manager.Brian Snyder/ZUMA

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Donald Trump has taken a lead in several national polls following the Republican convention, but Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook isn’t sweating it yet—at least not publicly.

Polls from the Los Angeles Times, CNN, and CBS News all have Trump slightly ahead nationally following the RNC. But at a press briefing on the opening morning of the Democratic National Convention, Mook dismissed concerns that his candidate was lagging, pointing out that conventions have always boosted a candidate’s polling numbers in the past. “There’s a clear trend historically in polling that after your convention, you always get a bump,” Mook said. “I would kind of suspend any kind of polling analysis until after our convention.”

Polling guru Nate Silver weighed in over the weekend and said that while Trump’s poll numbers certainly have improved post-convention, “the initial data suggests that a small-to-medium bounce is more likely than a large one.” He added on Twitter that Trump got a typical bounce of 4 percent. Still, Silver’s model on FiveThirtyEight now predicts that Trump would stand a 57.5 percent chance of winning if the election were held today. But like Mook, he notes that Trump’s lead is due to a standard convention bounce, and his more advanced model has the same message for Clinton supporters: Don’t panic just yet.

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At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

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So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

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