Hillary Clinton would be facing a double-digit polling deficit against Donald Trump if media bias against the Republican presidential hopeful didn’t exist, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich argued on Sunday.
“I think that without the unending one-sided assault of the news media, Trump would be beating Hillary by 15 points,” Gingrich, a top Trump ally, said during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.”
Trump trails Clinton by 5.5 percent in the current RealClearPolitics national polling average, and he has fallen behind her in a number of battleground states that are critical to his path to victory.
The GOP nominee has been engulfed in controversy since the release of a 2005 audio tape, in which he made lewd comments about women, led several Republican lawmakers to withdraw their support and more than a dozen women to come forward with allegations of sexual assault against him.
Considering the onslaught of criticism and never-ending controversy his campaign has faced since the first presidential debate last month, Gingrich said it is “amazing that Trump is as close as he is right now” in national polls.
Still, Gingrich said Trump would be doing even better if the mainstream media didn’t favor his Democratic opponent so heavily.
“The news media’s one-sidedness is the worst I’ve seen in my lifetime, and I’m old enough that’s a fairly long statement,” he said.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll released Sunday found Clinton and Trump in a statistical tie nationally, with Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson polling at 5 percent support and Green Party candidate Jill Stein at 2 percent. Neither third-party candidate qualified to join both major-party presidential nominees for the third and final debate next week.
