18:21

The Guardian’s Ben Jacobs has more on Donald Trump’s insistence that the statistical tool of “oversampling” is tantamount to voter suppression (which it’s not):

Donald Trump. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Donald Trump escalated his rhetoric against the media and against pollsters on Monday, alleging that both were part of a “rigged system” trying to undermine his candidacy.



Speaking in a rally in St Augustine, Florida, Trump falsely claimed that hacked emails of John Podesta showed that the Clinton campaign chair was “rigging the polls by oversampling Democrats”.

The Republican nominee, whose campaign is managed by the pollster Kellyanne Conway, called this “a voter suppression technique”. Oversampling is a method used by pollsters to get better measurements of specific sub-groups and is entirely normal in polling.

The statement followed a tweet from the Republican on Monday morning in which he claimed: “Major story that the Dems are making up phony polls in order to suppress the the Trump [sic]. We are going to WIN!” Almost every independent poll has consistently shown a steady lead for Clinton since late July and Conway has repeatedly conceded in recent days that Trump is behind.