Greg Sargent: RNC Withholding Data Showing Trump's Unpopularity from Down Ballot Candidates.

Columnist Greg Sargent, in his Plum Line blog at the Washington Post cites a Pro Publica piece of Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale to show that Trump’s popularity had gotten so low that the RNC is keeping the facts from down ballot candidates lest they seek to distance themselves from Kumquat Klanboss or disseminate it to others who might benefit from knowing the truth.

“President Trump is raging about data again, this time angrily denouncing a new Post-ABC News poll that shows him trailing the leading Democratic candidates by sizable margins. Trump claims this poll is rigged and that if it weren’t for the “fake news,” he’d be trouncing all rivals by 20 points.

Polling this early isn’t predictive, but it does shed light on Trump’s deep unpopularity — indeed, the Post-ABC News poll has his approval sliding to 38 percent. And Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to make his dismal public standing disappear, as part of a broader war on information waged by Trumpworld, most recently to prop up his falsehoods about Hurricane Dorian.

Now we’re getting fresh examples of this war on facts — and they’re both remarkably revealing…

“…”Since Trump’s election in 2016, critical “voter scores” — sophisticated polling-based analytics that the RNC provides to party committees and candidates — have conspicuously omitted an essential detail for any down-ballot race: how voters in specific states and congressional districts feel about Trump. Republican insiders believe these analytics are being withheld to try and prevent GOP candidates from publicly distancing themselves from the president or leaking unfavorable results that embarrass Trump.

“They don’t want you to know if it isn’t good,” says former RNC chairman Michael Steele, a vocal Trump critic. “There’s a lot of data they’re sitting on that they’re not sharing.” Steele adds that today, “the RNC is not an independent actor; the RNC is now a part of the Trump campaign. The question now isn’t, ‘What do you need?’ The question is, ‘Do you support Donald Trump?’”

And what is the second example Sargent promised.

Merely that Trump has presented, as if it is a U.S. Gov. Document, a report of immigrant detentions in Mexico, written in Mexico to procure Trump’s favor and is probably not all that accurate.

“On Tuesday, Trump tweeted out a chart that purported to show a sharp decline in migrants remaining in the United States pending processing, because of the new arrangement in which Mexico cracks down on their passage and some migrants are sent back there. Trump touted “Incredible progress. ”

But as The Post’s Nick Miroff learned, this chart was supplied to Trump by Mexican officials. Though there has been a decline in border crossings, in reality, U.S. government data shows that the picture is far less rosy, and migrant crossings are still very high.

The real key here, though, is the active supplanting of U.S. government data with other data more to Trump’s liking, for naked propagandistic purposes:”

In short Trump’s war on the truth rages unabated whether you are a Republican candidate in a swing district wondering why your fealty to der leader isn’t winning you votes outside the rapidly shrinking Republican base or a simple minded MAG-Hat wondering just why it is that we need more wall, money, troops, and jail-cells if Mexico is doing such a bang up job stemming the flow of refugees.

Keep telling the truth, Greg, and we’ll keep reading.