Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Yesterday began with a New York Times poll that was pretty awful for President Donald Trump, and I was contemplating writing a complicated item about whether we should pay attention to such surveys at this point in the election cycle. But then the lobsters. The president on Wednesday night announced some new initiatives to help the Maine lobster industry, and accompanied the plan with a false tweet claiming that "Pres. Obama destroyed the lobster and fishing industry in Maine. Now it's back, bigger and better than anyone ever thought possible." In fact, people who know the industry noted that it was doing just fine until Trump's trade war. But CNN's Jake Tapper made a different point. He noted that presidential actions and communications are often carefully targeted — in this case, to Maine's second congressional district, which has its own electoral vote. He concluded that "whatever you think of President Trump, and despite current crappy polls for him, he has the power of incumbency & many smart GOP operatives working hard to get him re-elected using all the levers of the most powerful government in the world."Well, yes. But there are two more important points that this stunt raises. One is that we shouldn't really think about this kind of targeted action as something that is above and beyond the polls. Instead, we should read those polls — which show the president more than 14 percentage points underwater in approval rating and about 10 percentage points behind former Vice President Joe Biden in horse-race matchups — as already including the president's ability to deliver specialized benefits to targeted constituencies. That is, while such giveaways almost certainly help an incumbent president, they're no match for overarching events such as the pandemic, the economic disaster that came with it and Trump's reaction to nationwide protests against police violence. Not to mention all the things that have made Trump unpopular from the beginning. The second point? Trump's ability to benefit from such efforts is diminished by his reputation for dishonesty. Sure, he can keep falsely claiming that Obama destroyed the lobster industry. But no one aside from his strongest supporters is going to believe him, and reporters are going to check the facts because they expect to prove him wrong. After all, they've surely seen CNN's reporting on Trump's "wildly inaccurate" claims that Obama had left him no ventilators; it turns out that according to the administration's own figures the number was actually 16,000 — or more than they've distributed so far during the coronavirus outbreak. And this is hardly the only tall tale that Trump has repeated. Now, I can't demonstrate that Trump is unpopular because he doesn't tell the truth. But it's clear from polling that most people outside of his strongest supporters say they don't trust him, and it stands to reason that this makes his campaign's targeted messages and actions less effective. It's also consistent with his longstanding unpopularity. Which gets us back to the polls. They're certainly not perfect, and there's a lot more to politics than horse-race surveys. But polls — which are after all just a systematic way of measuring public opinion — give us a pretty good baseline against which to assess any other claims about public opinion and voting. And that's an excellent reason for news organizations and academics to conduct them, and for good analysts to explain the results. 1. Robert Farley on election administration in Kentucky. 2. Curd Knupfer at the Monkey Cage on "antifa." 3. Adam Serwer on demonizing Biden. 4. Clare Malone on the Republicans as a white party. 5. My Bloomberg Opinion colleagues from around the world on how the U.S. looks during the pandemic. 6. And the NBC News crew on why Dr. Anthony Fauci is more popular than Trump. They're correct, of course, but one point they missed: A normal president, instead of publicly whining about someone in his administration being more popular than he is, would find a way to use that person's popularity to help himself. That never seems to occur to Trump. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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