Vice President JD Vance bit back at a Fox News host after being presented with unfavorable polling for the Republican Party.
Appearing on The Story with Martha MacCallum on Tuesday afternoon for a lengthy interview, Vance was asked about Fox News polling from late January showing that if midterm elections were held today, 52% of Americans would vote for a Democrat, compared to just 46% for a Republican.
“We’ve got a long way to go, but obviously that number would not be good for the majority,” MacCallum said.
“That would not be good,” Vance replied, adding, “I will say, as much as we love Fox News, we always think Fox News has the worst polling.”
“Me and the president agree on that. I’m sorry. It’s true,” he continued.
MacCallum responded by offering to show polling from different firms that ultimately showed a similar gap between the parties, telling Vance, “I can show you other ones that are very similar, but since they’re ours, I show ours.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Fox News for comment.
YouGov polling conducted this week shows that 47 percent of registered voters plan to vote for a Democrat in the upcoming midterms, compared to just 40 percent who would vote for a Republican, an even wider gap than that shown in Fox News’ polling.
Vance continued to deliver his party’s pitch in a lengthy monologue before telling MacCallum, “I think the question we’re going to put to the American people is: do you want to give the government back over to the people who, frankly, burned down the house and made most Americans much less wealthy and much less safe, or do you want to double down on the president’s leadership, which has helped us recover from some of the problems caused by Joe Biden and then has built a lot on top of it?”
The Trump administration has not shied away from criticizing pollsters before; a search for the word “poll” on the president’s Truth Social yields countless results, many of which are him complaining about negative polling results and accusing firms of lying.
“Fake and Fraudulent Polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense,” Trump wrote on Jan. 26.
“Something has to be done about Fraudulent Polling,” he continued, before mentioning Fox News by name as well as the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal. “Even the Polls of FoxNews and The Wall Street Journal have been, over the years, terrible! There are great Pollsters that called the Election right, but the Media does not want to use them in any way, shape, or form. Isn’t it sad what has happened to American Journalism, but I am going to do everything possible to keep this Polling SCAM from moving forward!”
In December, 2024, Trump initiated a lawsuit against Iowa pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register over a poll published prior to the election that showed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the lead.
The lawsuit came after Trump complained about Selzer on Truth Social a month earlier.
“A totally Fake poll that caused great distrust and uncertainty at a very critical time,” he wrote. “She knew exactly what she was doing. Thank you to the GREAT PEOPLE OF IOWA for giving me such a record breaking vote, despite possible ELECTION FRAUD by Ann Selzer and the now discredited ‘newspaper’ for which she works.”
He ended his post by calling for an investigation into Selzer’s polling. Selzer left her role at the newspaper shortly after the election, citing a desire to move on “to other ventures and opportunities.”
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