Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee, narrowed down his appearances on the Sunday political talk shows this weekend to just one: Fox News. Perhaps this was because his multiple appearances a week ago had him trying to defend his running mate Donald Trump’s past engagement with a notorious antisemite; perhaps it was because he is viewed broadly negatively, including among Fox News’s central audience, Republicans.
Whatever the reason, the friendly environment allowed Vance to lean into claims that would have met more resistance elsewhere, like Trump’s long-standing insistence that every bad poll is (somehow) intentionally and dishonestly bad to (somehow) hurt him politically.
Vance was presented with The Washington Post’s new poll, conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News, showing Vice President Kamala Harris with a four-point lead nationally.
At first, Vance offered the standard politician’s response: It’s still early, we just have to run our campaign, polls are often off the mark. But then he came back to the point repeatedly offered by the campaign since Harris took over as the Democratic nominee: The polls are fake.
“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,” he insisted to host Shannon Bream. “I’m telling you, every single person who’s watching this: The Trump campaign is in a very, very good spot. We’re going to win this race.”
Instead of addressing that claim at the outset — we’ll get to it, don’t worry — let’s examine why it exists.
It is unacceptable to Donald Trump that he be seen as anything less than successful and popular. Even when he won the presidency in 2016, the apex achievement in American politics, he fumed that Hillary Clinton had won more votes and that people attributed his success to Russian interference. So he claimed (without evidence) that the popular vote had been tainted by fraud and he embarked on a years-long (and ongoing) effort to undercut the investigation into Russia’s role in the election.
When he lost in 2020 … well, you know what happened then. Trump posited that hundreds of people had committed federal felonies to remove him from office, a mark of how important he was and how dangerous to the establishment.
So now Harris becomes the nominee and the polls shift from a slight Trump advantage to a slight Harris advantage. But Trump can’t have that. So now the polls aren’t just wrong, they’re deliberately wrong for, uh, some reason.
In fairness, Vance and Trump do offer reasons, just not good ones. Polls showing Trump trailing are efforts to tamp down enthusiasm, they claim, or to suppress the vote or to stoke infighting. So let’s address those ideas.
First, there’s no evidence that enthusiasm for Trump is diminished by the new contours of the race or by polling since Harris become the nominee. Monmouth University polling found that Republicans were just as enthusiastic as ever. Pew Research Center found a marked increase in motivation to vote from July to August — probably in part because it’s more important to vote for Trump in a race he might lose than in one you’re confident he’ll win.
This speaks to the suppression point, too. Campaigns, even ones with big leads, will often characterize themselves as just a bit behind. It’s useful: You can insist that you need more contributions, and you can compel people to vote more easily. Some research in the wake of the 2016 election indicated that confidence in Clinton’s likely victory might have acted as a disincentive for people to vote. If you need to get your kids fed and you need to vote, you might be more likely to just feed the kids if you think your candidate is going to win anyway.
Of course, this idea of “suppression” makes more sense in general when there is voting to suppress! No ballots are out right now, so claiming that people are seeing The Post’s poll and therefore not voting is like my saying that my need to put gas in my car is why I’m not flying to the moon.
The point about infighting is probably closer to accurate, but it suffers from a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Infighting isn’t downstream from getting bad poll numbers; both are downstream from disadvantageous shifts in a race. If the Trump campaign is hiring new people and debating new messaging targets because external polling that they don’t even trust suddenly shows him trailing, then they are doing a lousy job executing their campaign and they should probably hire new people! If outside allies are sniping at each other because the polls shifted, then talk to those allies and reassure them that you’re actually on target. Maybe with something a bit more specific and grounded than “we are in a very, very good spot.”
Again, this is working backward. The obvious reason polls shifted isn’t that there is some desire to suppress votes or get Trump people battling each other, it’s that the race shifted. It did shift! In one of the most obvious ways in recent political history! Why wouldn’t polls change?
Remember, too, that The Post and ABC News and Ipsos — like every other reputable pollster — exist on their reputations. We are explicitly in the business of presenting accurate information to the public, including assessments of elections. The Trump campaign, by contrast, is explicitly in the business of presenting Trump as the best candidate for president and reinforcing his ability to win. Which of those groups is more likely, in your objective assessment, to be willing to present false claims in an effort to swing the election results?
Vance and Trump know that they can just say stuff and that their allies will accept it or repeat it. Vance can makes this claim on Fox News without worrying about being challenged, which he wasn’t.
That’s a low bar, mind you. He also wasn’t challenged when he compared Harris to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who was friends with … Donald Trump. If anything might dampen enthusiasm for Trump, it might be having his running mate bring up Epstein without prompting.
The good news for Vance, though, is that it’s still not the case that there’s any voting he might inadvertently suppress.