Trump's reply? "I'm not sure I believe it."

O'Reilly pointed out that this is what the polling says, with which Trump agreed. Trump then insisted that his team would stay the course.

Raising the question: Does he really believe that he's doing okay with women?

During a rally in Florida on Wednesday, Trump suggested he did.

Earlier in the day, Trump made another iffy claim about his support. "The young people like me better than Bernie," Trump said. Perhaps the young people who live at Trump Tower, but I'd be skeptical that any young person who lives more than a block's distance from there would agree.

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Let's first address those claims.

In the most recent Post-ABC poll, released at the end of last month, Hillary Clinton had a 2-point lead over Trump with likely voters. Among men, Trump led by 19. Among women, Clinton led by 20. There are some indications, though, that the 2005 audio recording of Trump on "Access Hollywood" may have made that gap worse. An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that women had moved away from Trump by 9 points in the wake of the tape's release. A new poll in Wisconsin indicates that women in that state had shifted toward Clinton by 24 more points on Saturday and Sunday than on Thursday, the day before the tape came out.

Young people are categorically not more supportive of Trump than they were of Sanders. Young people preferred Sanders, for example. Trump trails with those under 40 by a nearly 2-to-1 margin in a four-way contest, according to the most recent Post-ABC poll. It's true that Clinton doesn't do as well with younger voters as Sanders did, but in past polls that's because they've been lured away by third-party candidates, not because they're engaged by Trump.

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There's a valid question about the extent to which Trump believes in the accuracy of polls. In the primaries, he insisted on pointing out how well he was doing in polls, until such time as he could point out how well he did in the actual voting. But Trump is still new to politics and spent most of the primary without investing in polling of his own. His campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, has a background in polling, but there's no evidence that Trump really understands or cares about the difference between a post-debate Drudge survey and a well-designed national survey from Gallup. If you want to be skeptical about poll results, there's nothing preventing you from doing so! But if you're trying to predict the outcome of an election, polls hold some value.

The great dream of the first-time politician is that the polls are wrong, and you're capturing something unique, ephemeral. That people will be so inspired by your candidacy that they will flock to the polls in patterns that the pollsters couldn't predict. Like Barack Obama in 2008, when young people were surprisingly enthusiastic about his candidacy. Came out in droves. That year the polling average showed a 7.6-point Obama victory. He won by 7.3.