Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance doesn’t care about the results of public opinion polls, saying he cares only about “winning the trust of the American voters.”
That was in response to a question a reporter asked him during a campaign event in Philadelphia on Monday when the topic of polling came up.
Earlier in the year, GOP nominee Donald Trump was way ahead of President Joe Biden in polls about a hypothetical head-to-head matchup in the General Election.
Since Biden has stepped aside from the election, though, and Vice President Kamala Harris has taken his place as the Democratic nominee, the gap has closed significantly — with Harris even out ahead in some polls.
At the campaign event earlier this week, one reporter brought up the fact that Trump led BIden by an average of 4.5% in polls conducted in Pennsylvania on July 21. Today, though, the former president is in a virtual tie with the vice president.
The reporter then asked Vance whether he believed what the polls were saying, as well as what he believed the Trump-Vance ticket needed to do to regain that ground.
Vance said:
“Well look, I don’t believe the polls when they say that we’re up. I don’t believe the polls when they say tied. I don’t believe the polls that say that we’re down. Our job is to win the trust of the American voters, not public opinion polls.”
Vance does have some real-world personal experience he can draw on to show that public opinion polls sometimes are completely wrong. In the 2022 midterm elections, the Ohioan won a seat on the U.S. Senate by defeating Tim Ryan by 6.1%, even though polls conducted before the election predicted he was going to lose.
FiveThirtyEight collects average polling results, which in September of 2022 showed that Vance was slightly behind Ryan by 45% to 44.5%.
As Vance explained:
What I think, and I saw this in my race for the Senate, I remember when all the public opinion polls in August said that I was going to lose my race in the United States Senate and then I won in a pretty convincing fashion just a couple of months later.
“I believe that the media puts out these polls knowing that it’s going to depress turnout and it’s going to make the conversation about the polls. Who cares what the polls say? Whether they say we’re up or down, what I care about is that Americans can’t afford groceries.
“That’s why we’re running, and that’s the problem that we’re going to fix, and that’s why Donald Trump, I believe, is going to win the state of Pennsylvania. He’s going to win the whole country.”
One recent survey that Navigator Research conducted shows that Vance might be right. Harris isn’t leading in even one of the major battleground states, which would pose a huge barrier to her winning the election.
