Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the Republican Party\u2019s 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\u2019s past engagement with a notorious antisemite; perhaps it was because he is viewed broadly negatively, including among Fox News\u2019s central audience, Republicans.<\/p>\n
Whatever the reason, the friendly environment allowed Vance to lean into claims that would have met more resistance elsewhere, like Trump\u2019s long-standing insistence that every bad poll is (somehow) intentionally and dishonestly bad to (somehow) hurt him politically.<\/p>\n
Vance was presented with The Washington Post\u2019s new poll, conducted by Ipsos in partnership with ABC News, showing Vice President Kamala Harris with a four-point lead nationally.<\/p>\n
At first, Vance offered the standard politician\u2019s response: It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cConsistently, what you\u2019ve 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,\u201d he insisted to host Shannon Bream. \u201cI\u2019m telling you, every single person who\u2019s watching this: The Trump campaign is in a very, very good spot. We\u2019re going to win this race.\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead of addressing that claim at the outset \u2014 we\u2019ll get to it, don\u2019t worry \u2014 let\u2019s examine why it exists.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s role in the election.<\/p>\n
When he lost in 2020 \u2026 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.<\/p>\n
So now Harris becomes the nominee and the polls shift from a slight Trump advantage to a slight Harris advantage. But Trump can\u2019t have that. So now the polls aren\u2019t just wrong, they\u2019re deliberately wrong for, uh, some reason.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s address those ideas.<\/p>\n
First, there\u2019s 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 \u2014 probably in part because it\u2019s more important to vote for Trump in a race he might lose than in one you\u2019re confident he\u2019ll win.<\/p>\n
This speaks to the suppression point, too. Campaigns, even ones with big leads, will often characterize themselves as just a bit behind. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Of course, this idea of \u201csuppression\u201d 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\u2019s poll and therefore not voting is like my saying that my need to put gas in my car is why I\u2019m not flying to the moon.<\/p>\n
The point about infighting is probably closer to accurate, but it suffers from a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Infighting isn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019re actually on target. Maybe with something a bit more specific and grounded than \u201cwe are in a very, very good spot.\u201d<\/p>\n
Again, this is working backward. The obvious reason polls shifted isn\u2019t that there is some desire to suppress votes or get Trump people battling each other, it\u2019s that the race shifted. It did shift! In one of the most obvious ways in recent political history! Why wouldn\u2019t polls change?<\/p>\n
Remember, too, that The Post and ABC News and Ipsos \u2014 like every other reputable pollster \u2014 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?<\/p>\n
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\u2019t.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a low bar, mind you. He also wasn\u2019t challenged when he compared Harris to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who was friends with \u2026 Donald Trump. If anything might dampen enthusiasm for Trump, it might be having his running mate bring up Epstein without prompting.<\/p>\n
The good news for Vance, though, is that it\u2019s still not the case that there\u2019s any voting he might inadvertently suppress.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the Republican Party\u2019s vice-presidential nominee, narrowed down his appearances on the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3053,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3052\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tradetrovex.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}