In addition to Ms. Conway’s former firm, the Trump adviser said the campaign would cut ties with Adam Geller, a pollster for former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, and Michael Baselice, a pollster for former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, both late additions to Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016.
[Want to know what it’s like to cover the White House? Ask Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for The Times, here.]
NBC News first reported the decision to oust the pollsters, although it did not identify which ones. Two other pollsters, Tony Fabrizio and John McLaughlin, will remain with the campaign.
Mr. Trump angrily denied receiving polls showing him losing or instructing aides to deny them. “Those polls don’t exist,” Mr. Trump told ABC News in an interview broadcast on Thursday. “I just had a meeting with somebody that’s a pollster and I’m winning everywhere, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But on Friday, ABC reported specific information from that supposedly fake polling. The data obtained by ABC showed Mr. Biden leading Mr. Trump 55 percent to 39 percent in Pennsylvania, 51 percent to 41 percent in Wisconsin and by seven points in Florida. The president was leading in Texas, a bulwark for Republican presidential candidates for four decades, by just two points.
When approached by the network with the numbers, Mr. Parscale confirmed that they were accurate, but dismissed them as outdated, insisting that the president’s public standing had subsequently been helped by Attorney General William P. Barr’s initial characterization of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. A redacted version of Mr. Mueller’s report has since been released, showing that it was not as favorable as Mr. Barr suggested.
“These leaked numbers are ancient, in campaign terms, from months-old polling that began in March before two major events had occurred: the release of the summary of the Mueller report exonerating the president, and the beginning of the Democrat candidates defining themselves with their far-left policy message,” Mr. Parscale said in a statement on Friday.