J.D. Vance desperately tried to downplay new polls showing Kamala Harris in the lead on Sunday—but he couldn’t back up his outlandish claims.
During an interview on Fox News, host Shannon Bream asked Vance about a New York Times/Siena Poll published Saturday that found Harris was leading Donald Trump among likely voters in Arizona, 50 percent to 45 percent. The poll also found that Harris had passed Trump in North Carolina, leading him 49 percent to 47 percent, and that she had significantly narrowed the former president’s lead in Georgia and Nevada.
“What is the administration doing—the campaign doing with that data, as it comes in?” Bream asked Vance, who is not doing so well in the polls himself. “I mean, these are critical states that you’ve gotta have to have a path to 270. Are there any pivots, are there any, um, you know, reconfiguring of what you’re doing in this strategy? Because you talk about your message—but is it not landing?”
“First of all, the polls tend to radically overstate Democrats, we certainly saw that during the polling of summer of 2020 and summer of 2016. And of course, a lot of those polls were wrong when it came to Election Day,” Vance replied.
“Kamala Harris got a bit of a sugar high a couple of weeks ago, but what we’ve actually seen from our own internal data, Shannon, is that Kamala Harris has already leveled off,” Vance said. “If you talk to insiders inside the Kamala Harris campaign, they’re very worried about where they are.”
By Vance’s account, there was absolutely no reason for the campaign to change course to address Trump’s weakening polls—or the high-energy campaign that caused the shift. Behind the scenes, however, the Trump team hired several new staffers last week from old Trump campaigns, including Trump’s campaign manager from 2016, Corey Lewandowski.
"If you talk to insiders in the Kamala Harris campaign, they're very worried about where they are" -- JD Vance responds to Harris leading in the polls by insisting the polls are wrong pic.twitter.com/YfdzJD9HRH
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 18, 2024
Bream also asked Vance about a national Washington Post/ABC/IPSOS poll published Sunday, which found Harris to have a slight lead nationally. “Those are new numbers, so if you think the momentum is not swinging, or your internal polls are suggesting differently—every other poll that;s been released has shown great momentum in her direction,” Bream said.
“You know, Shannon, I think there are a lot of polls that actually show her stagnating and leveling off,” Vane said, claiming that Washington Post/ABC had been “a wildly inaccurate pollster in the summer of 2020.”
“And look, if you see the numbers that we’re seeing and you actually talk to the American people, I feel extremely confident that we’re gonna be in the right place come November. We can’t worry about polls, we have to run through the finish line and encourage everybody to get out there and vote,” Vance said, but he wasn’t done, he had time to sprinkle in one last conspiracy theory.
“Consistently what you’ve seen in 2016 and 2020 is that the media uses fake polls to drive down Republican turnout and to create dissension and conflict with Republican voters,” Vance said, insisting that the campaign was in a “very, very good spot.”
JD Vance: "The media uses fake polls to drive down Republican turnout and to create dissension and conflict with Republican voters." pic.twitter.com/2ELn6LBQ1z
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 18, 2024
There is little evidence to suggest that a poll published in August could convince someone not to vote in November. If anything, a positive poll might convince someone not to vote, because they think their preferred candidate is safe, rather than a negative one convincing someone it’s a lost cause.
Since Harris began her meteoric rise in the polls, the Trump campaign has taken to the practice of disseminating “unskewed” polls, which means adjusting poll results based on the difference between election results and recalled votes of respondents, or how they claim to have voted four years ago. Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio and data consultant Tim Saler have claimed that new polls understate support for Trump in 2020, and that adjusting according to recalled votes creates a more accurate picture of Trump’s chances. Recalled votes are considered by some to be an unreliable metric.
The Trump campaign appears to have decided that if a new poll doesn’t line up with the recall record, it must be inaccurate. Using this method, the campaign has begun to claim that any poll that doesn’t find Trump in the lead is a lie.
