If you’re to believe the polls, Vice President Kamala Harris has a small but significant lead in the national polls, and is ahead slightly in a goodly number of the battleground states.
However, Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, says that you should probably put a bit of a caveat in there: If you’re to believe the public polls, Harris is leading.
In her internal polling, Vance says, he thinks the vice president “doesn’t like her numbers.”
In a wide-ranging interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson published Wednesday, Vance said that internal polling and how journalists cover it is a dance that most Americans who aren’t in politics or the media don’t quite understand.
“You know how this works, but I’ll sort of give some insight into this for your viewers and your listeners,” Vance said.
“I’ve said, ‘Look, Kamala’s own internal polls are not very good right now.’ And, of course, the lefties say, ‘Well, J.D. Vance is the VP candidate for Republicans, nobody in Kamala Harris’ campaign is talking to him,’” he continued.
“And that’s right, by the way: Kamala Harris’ campaign is not talking to me. But they are talking to journalists. And then those journalists want insights into what’s going on with the Republican ticket. They want to see our internal numbers.
“And, look, the journalists are telling me that Kamala Harris doesn’t like her numbers. The journalists are telling me our campaign does like their numbers. There’s a consistency of story here.”
Carlson then noted that “the journalist act is a kind of — it’s an information” courier service for campaigns.
Do you like JD Vance?
After the two joked that some of them act as intelligence operatives both figuratively and literally, Vance laughed and said that “journalists are to electoral politics what like, the CIA is to international relations.”
“People think, just like in polling, they think, ‘Oh, polls are designed to measure what people think!’” Carlson quipped. “‘Journalists are designed to report what happened!’ No, journalists are players in the political system.”
“And they do not disclose that to their readers, and you see it up close. But it’s interesting, they play the role of like, covert diplomats between the campaigns,” he added, which Vance agreed to.
Vance also said that this mostly tracked with what journalists were saying in each of the past three elections.
For instance, in 2016, the hardcore Hillaristas were apparently very confident in their numbers, while more realistic veterans like Bill Clinton weren’t. Meanwhile, in 2020, both sides seemed confused as to what the numbers meant.
This time, Vance said, the internal numbers tell a similarly consistent story.
“Look, I think we’re in a good spot,” he said. “But you can’t take this stuff for granted, right?”
Excellent new video with JD Vance and Tucker discussing internal polling for the Kamala campaign — and it’s not going well.pic.twitter.com/piZB7Ej2to
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) September 19, 2024
The full interview, for the curious, is here:
No one in Washington seems to know how much we’re spending on illegal aliens. JD Vance plans to find out.
(0:10) Meet Atlas
(1:14) JD Vance’s Predictions About the Election
(5:30) The Left’s Plan to Beat Trump
(12:04) How Much Is the US Spending on Illegal Immigration?
(23:04)… pic.twitter.com/L4tj66uLwp— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) September 18, 2024
Now, if one is to go by the RealClearPolitics polling average, there is a two-point gap in the national aggregate polling in Harris’ favor, 49.3 percent to 47.3 percent for Trump, as of Thursday morning.
However, the battleground states are still neck-and-neck, and Trump has always fared better at internal polls than he has in the general polls; consider that both Hillary and Joe Biden were up over wider margins in the RCP national aggregate by what they ended up winning by, in Biden’s case significantly so. And the national vote, after all, counts for nothing.
Furthermore, there should be cause for concern if one looks at the numbers more closely. Consider younger voters, who Biden won by 28 points in 2020. He was only up by seven points among that 18-29 demographic when he dropped out, as per data from the Cook Political Report, and the assumption was that Harris would do better.
That assumption was right, but not by the margins that one might expect: Last week, CNN noted Harris was only up by 15 points in that demographic, hardly the bounce the campaign was hoping for.
These are the targeted things that internal polling catches more often than general polls — which exist to give us the temperature of the race in broad terms, not zero in on very specific demographics or the level of enthusiasm. Quite frankly, there’s no money or interest in reporting that minutiae.
There is money and interest, if you’re in politics or the media, in knowing it, however. Don’t think that doesn’t happen behind the scenes. Yes, this is just J.D. Vance talking, but the words ring true enough.
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