CNN’s Dana Bash Pushes Trump Pollster For An Answer After He Deflects on Bad Numbers: ‘This Is What You Get Paid to Do’

John McLaughlin, a pollster for former President Donald Trump’s campaign, was asked by CNN’s Dana Bash what his numbers were showing after the candidate’s now-infamous appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists Convention. He had a lot of answers — to different questions that were never actually asked.

For nearly the entire six-minute segment, Bash tried to get McLaughlin to provide her with what kind of data response Trump got after his combative appearance at the NABJ where he attacked Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity. But instead of supplying any kind of polling data in reply to that question, McLaughlin wanted to discuss “issues”:

Bash: We talked about this before, and the former president talks about it very openly, how much he is trying to court Black voters, particularly Black men. The fact that he decided to focus on the Vice President’s race, falsely claim that she is not a Black woman, even though she, like about 33 million Americans, is multiracial. You’re a data guy. Does your data show that this is a good strategy?

McLaughlin: Well, I think the president went to the Black journalists at their invitation, and Kamala Harris wasn’t there. And that was his choice. He was doing something that there was a high risk with it, and he got, you know, some ambush questions. But you know what? That story’s over with. The page is turned. Yesterday, you know, we’re talking about the Olympics where you have, you know, it’s gender ideology is an issue in the United States. And you have these men as boxers, beating up women boxers in the Olympics. And Kamala Harris doesn’t, you know, address that. So and today, you know, there’s a higher unemployment number and the market’s down. And she’s not talking about economics. So, you know, she may be running more of a — while Donald Trump is out there and he’s going to Atlanta tomorrow — Kamala Harris may be running more of a [President] Joe Biden “basement” kind of strategy because she doesn’t want to take on issues that are risks.

That said, Bash pushed again:

Bash: So, I appreciate what you’re doing, because this is what you get paid to do. You get paid to focus on the issues that your data shows could move the needle. But you know that people are not going to unsee and unhear what the former president said about her race, and she barely responded to it. But I just want to kind of stay focused on this because you all have been so bullish about expanding beyond the Republican base. And in all candor, is there any world in which that is going to help him expand that base, or will it hurt him?

McLaughlin: Well, I tell you, the president, President Trump has been out. You know, he’s been campaigning. He’s going to Atlanta tomorrow. He’s been out there campaigning. And he wanted to go there and talk about things like he did when he went to the Bronx. And the new national poll that we put out a couple days ago, just like on June 26th, he was ahead of Joe Biden by two points. He’s ahead of Kamala Harris by two points in our poll, 47-45. And there’s other polls that are even better, like Mark Penn’s poll, the Harvard Harris poll had him up four, Rasmussen Reports has him up five. And the difference is, okay, so we went down a little among African-Americans from 28 to 18 points in our poll and down four points in the Hispanics. But we went up among white voters and we’re up in rural areas. We’re up 62 to 33. So there’s a shift in the race going on right now. And granted, you know, Kamala Harris probably wants to get more of the African-American vote back from Donald Trump and wants to get more of the Hispanic vote back from us. But as we’ve talked about in the campaigns, talking about she’s really liberal. She’s beyond Joe Biden as far as liberal. And we want to talk about the issues. We want to talk about inflation, we want to talk about the jobs report coming down today.

Bash actually did cover the jobs report in a later segment, but that’s not why she had McLaughlin on her show:

Bash: But he’s not, we when he gets — forgive me, but when he gets press — totally, he talks about that. But when he says he knows what he’s doing. It’s not his first rodeo. And when he throws a flame like that, a racial, racist flame like that, how does that help? Not just with African-American voters, but with other voters who look at that and say, “Is this really what we want?” Especially when he he does things, like he posted, Harris’s birth certificate on social media and reposted attacks on the reporter who was asking him legitimate questions.

McLaughlin: I think when you look at when you go to like tomorrow, he’s doing the rally in Atlanta. When you see when you see like he did the rally in Harrisburg the other day in the rally in, Minnesota, over the weekend, on Saturday. He talks, the vast majority of those of those speeches that he gives are about issues. Just like he tried to do in the forum with the African-American journalists. So I think what you want to talk about is different than what we want to talk about, and that’s fine.

Watch the video above via CNN.