DONALD Trump used to LOVE the polls.

During the primaries, when he was way ahead in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump bragged incessantly about his strong poll numbers and mocked his rivals for lagging behind. He repeatedly answered policy questions with long soliloquys about winning in the polls. He stayed up late at night tweeting all the new results.

Trump doesn’t do that anymore. He barely mentions the polls at all. FiveThirtyEight has crunched the numbers, and they’re stark.

Trump is not tweeting about the polls anymore: https://t.co/Z7OGYPtsZs pic.twitter.com/xLf6aou9I0 — FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) August 21, 2016

It’s easy to figure out why Trump has gone cold on polling data. Almost every national poll that’s been released this month has shown him losing badly to Hillary Clinton, with the exception of one lonely tie.

Trump is behind Clinton in every key swing state, and even a few Republican strongholds like Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona are up for grabs.

Polls can vary wildly, but at the moment, they’re all sending the same message: if the election were held now, Trump would suffer a defeat of humiliating proportions.

Most candidates would respond to such a dire situation with a significant change of strategy. Instead, Trump’s campaign has pretty much chosen to shout “La la la, not listening!” at the top of its lungs, and on national television no less.

The first public manifestation of this was Trump supporter Michael Cohen’s interview with CNN host Brianna Keilar last week. Only a full transcript of the exchange can do it justice.

Keilar: “You guys are down, and it makes sense that ...”

Cohen: “Says who?”

Keilar: “Polls ...”

Cohen: “Says who?”

Keilar: “Most of them. All of them?”

Cohen: “Says who?”

Keilar: “Polls. I just told you, I answered your question.”

Cohen: “Which polls?”

Keilar: “All of them.”

Cohen: “And your question is?”

When asked about being down in the race, Trump adviser replies, "Says who?"https://t.co/HO9wqbdDWR https://t.co/C2UzSDdUo4 — The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) August 17, 2016

That is a man in denial.

Several days later, Trump’s newly installed campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, was asked about the flood of bad polls on Britain’s Channel 4.

“Not all of them (are bad), no. Just the cherrypicked polling numbers that are put out there by media outlets that are bent on his destruction,” Conway said.

“Donald Trump performs consistently better in online polling where a human being is not talking to another human being about what he or she may do in the election.

“It’s because it’s become socially desirable, if you’re a college-educated person in the United States of America, to say that you’re against Donald Trump.

“The hidden Trump vote in this country is a very significant proposition,” she said. “I call it the undercover Trump voter, but it’s real.”

If Conway’s logic sounds eerily familiar, that’s because we’ve heard it so many times before. As The Atlantichas already pointed out, America’s political history is littered with losers who had managed to convince themselves they were actually going to win.

Four years ago, Republican candidate Mitt Romney didn’t even bother to write a concession speech. A bunch of conservative pundits were genuinely shocked by President Barack Obama’s comfortable win, because they had over-estimated the proportion of the electorate on their side.

In 2008, John McCain’s campaign was expecting a “hidden vote” to propel him over the line. Obama beat him easily.

In 1988, Democrat Michael Dukakis drew huge crowds to his rallies, much like Trump. “I smell victory,” he said at one of them. He lost 40 states out of 50.

Ronald Reagan was re-elected with 59 per cent of the vote and 49 states in his column in 1984, but not before his opponent, Walter Mondale, had said something positively Trumpesque:

“There’s something going on in this country and the pollsters aren’t getting it,” Mondale said. “Nobody who’s been with me for the last few days and has seen these crowds, seen their response, seen their enthusiasm, seen the intensity of their response and how they respond to these issues, nobody who’s been where I’ve been, can help but believe there’s something happening in this country.”

On Oct. 29, 1984, Walter Mondale cited his enthusiastic crowds to debunk polls. A week later he lost by 18 points. pic.twitter.com/IQDEmmWRnb — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) August 24, 2016

Mondale's aides claimed there was a "hidden women's vote" and a large minority turnout that polls were missing. https://t.co/pigijAVDML — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) August 24, 2016

We could go on and on. The point is, Trump’s conviction that “undercover voters” will win him the election is just the same delusional conspiracy theory losing candidates have clung to for decades. None of them have been vindicated yet.

Election day isn’t until November, so Trump has plenty of time to stage a resurgence — but he’ll never manage to do that if he keeps fooling himself.