Donald Trump might want to reconsider his love for those unscientific instant online polls.
A survey on the far-right website Breitbart surprisingly had Hillary Clinton winning the final presidential debate by 6 percentage points early Thursday.
The irony — Trump losing an unrepresentative poll hosted by a site that has unabashedly embraced him, and whose chairman left to run his campaign — was not lost on the internet.
Later in the morning, a surge of votes from Trump supporters brought the results close to even.
Informal polls like this are, of course, not reliable to determine the winner of a debate, because anyone can respond and vote over and over.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump from using them to declare himself the winner of each debate, even if scientific surveys show otherwise.
It’s unclear what accounted for Clinton’s win in the Breitbart poll, though some Trump supporters had their own theories.
Trump, for what it’s worth, didn’t let the unfavorable Breitbart results dampen his mood. He tweeted early Thursday a list of online polls — all of which showed him winning the debate.