For much of the year, Donald Trump had reason to be pleased with national and battleground state polling. Four years ago, surveys showed the Republican struggling badly ahead of his eventual defeat. In 2024, however, the data showed the former president consistently ahead.
That is, until it didn’t.
After incumbent President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and Vice President Kamala Harris’ candidacy gave Democrats a much-needed boost, public opinion research showed Trump’s advantage start to evaporate — both in head-to-head matchups and on key issues.
The GOP candidate and his political operation haven’t exactly handled the shift in a healthy way. Two weeks ago, for example, Team Trump embraced a “skewed polls” message reminiscent of 2012. On his social media platform, the former president also tweaked his messaging, abandoning missives about polls, and instead touting what he described as “real” polls that told him what he wanted to hear.
But it was his running mate, Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, who took matters in a deeply weird direction. HuffPost reported:
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) seemed unwilling to give weight to Donald Trump’s wilting poll numbers while appearing on Fox News this Sunday. The Republican vice presidential nominee dismissed the numbers during a conversation with Shannon Bream, telling the host of “Fox News Sunday” that polls were being used as a tool to discourage Republicans from voting in November.
“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,” the senator said.
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Vance added, “If you talk to insiders in the Kamala Harris campaign, they are very worried about where they are.”
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
For now, let’s not dwell on the dubious idea that Trump’s running mate has special insights into the perspectives of Harris campaign staffers — who probably aren’t sharing private thoughts with the far-right senator. Let’s instead consider just how bizarre Vance’s conspiracy theory is.
To hear Vance tell it, major independent news organizations conspired — more than once — to release false polling data, as part of an elaborate plot to discourage Republican voters. As far as the Ohioan is concerned, this is grounds for skepticism about 2024 polling.
In Grown-Up Land, of course, major independent news organizations have never conspired to distribute fraudulent survey data, and the fact that Vance peddled such a line to a national television audience is a reminder of just how ridiculous his messaging has become.
I did, however, have a follow-up question for the senator: If media outlets release “fake” polling data to manipulate Republican voters, why did the polls show Trump ahead for months? From Vance’s perspective, did news organizations temporarily forget, only to suddenly remember the plot?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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