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For much of the year, Donald Trump has had reason to be satisfied with national and swing-state polls. Four years ago, the polls showed the Republican struggling badly before his eventual defeat. But in 2024, the data shows the former president consistently ahead.
And this, until it did not happen.
After incumbent President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and Vice President Kamala Harris’s nomination gave Democrats a much-needed boost, public opinion polls showed that Trump’s advantage was beginning to evaporate — both in head-to-head matchups and in the primaries. Matches And on Key issues.
The Republican nominee and his political operation have not dealt with this shift in a healthy way. For example, two weeks ago, the Trump team adopted “Polls are skewed.“A message reminiscent of 2012. On his social media platform, the former president also adjusted his messaging, abandoning messages about polls and instead promoting what he described as “Real” Polls Who told him what he wanted to hear.
But it was his running mate, Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, who took things in a very strange direction. Reported:
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) seemed reluctant to weigh in on Donald Trump’s declining poll numbers during an appearance on Fox News on Sunday. The Republican vice presidential candidate dismissed the numbers during a conversation with Shannon Bream, telling the “Fox News Sunday” host that polls are being used as a tool to discourage Republicans from voting in November.
“What I saw consistently in 2016 and 2020 is the media using fake polls to drive down Republican turnout and create discord and conflict with Republican voters,” the senator said.
“If you talk to people in the Kamala Harris campaign who are knowledgeable, they are very concerned about where they are,” Vance added.
For now, let’s not focus on the dubious idea that Trump’s running mate has private insights into the views of Harris’s campaign staff — who may not share their own thoughts with the far-right senator. Instead, let’s consider how bizarre Vance’s conspiracy theory is.
According to Vance, major independent news organizations have conspired—more than once—to release false poll data as part of an elaborate plot to discourage Republican voters. For the Ohioan, this is reason to be skeptical of the polls in 2024.
In the adult world, of course, major independent news organizations would never conspire to distribute fraudulent poll data, and the fact that Vance promoted such a line to a national television audience is a reminder of how ridiculous his message is.
But I had another question for the senator: If the media was publishing “fake” poll data to manipulate Republican voters, why did the polls show Trump leading for months? In Vance’s view, did news organizations forget about it temporarily, and then suddenly remember the conspiracy?
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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