JD Vance compares Harris to Jeffrey Epstein and claims polls showing Trump losing are fake

Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox

Get our free Inside Washington email

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

JD Vance likened Vice President Kamala Harris to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in a wild interview on Sunday, where he also claimed that polls showing him and Donald Trump losing are “fake”.

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, the Republican vice presidential candidate made the bizarre comparison between the Democratic presidential contender and Epstein, the late notorious sex criminal who had known connections to central figures in American political life, including both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.

“Giving Kamala Harris control over inflation policy, it’s like giving Jeffrey Epstein control over human trafficking policy,” Vance told host Shannon Bream, as he attempted to land an attack on Harris over the issue of the economy.

Vance went on to power through his analogy and claim that the American people were “smarter” and would supposedly therefore not choose the vice president come November.

“The American people are much smarter than that. They don’t buy the idea that Kamala Harris represents a fresh start,” he said.

Bream did not challenge his invocation of Epstein’s name.

She did, however, press him on whether the Trump campaign was living in a fantasy as it continues to claim that polling shows the former president ahead of Harris.

In reality, national polling averages now show him behind Harris — though projected outcomes in the Electoral College are a bit more difficult to determine, and Trump remains ahead of Harris in some polling of swing states which determined the 2020 and 2016 elections.

Harris, since taking over the top of the Democratic ticket, has seen a massive recovery in states where President Joe Biden had been trailing Trump in all available polling just a short time ago.

When confronted with a new Washington Post/ABC News poll showing Harris with a slight lead nationally, Vance trashed the mainstream polling outfits and claimed that polls showing Harris in the lead are “fake.”

“I’m telling you, every single person who’s watching this, the Trump campaign is in a very, very good spot,” Vance told Bream about the Trump campaign’s level of support heading in to the general election.

“I think there are a lot of polls that actually show her stagnating and leveling off,” he went on. “ABC/Washington Post was a wildly inaccurate pollster in the summer of 2020.”

Vance’s remarks was correct to an extent — polls including the Post’s in 2020 did overstate Biden’s advantage in the presidential race, with the ABC/Washington Post poll in October 2020 finding Biden ahead by double digits.

But Biden did indeed lead his opponent in terms of actual support at the time, and most mainstream polls in 2020 were correct in their overall assessment of the race’s eventual victor. Two, including Trump’s favored pollster Rasmussen Reports, came within a percentage point of the actual final result.

And throughout the past four weeks, those polls have registered a major surge in support for Harris; one that has shown no signs of slowing down. In fact, conventional wisdom states that she will receive another polling bump in the coming days as Democrats gather for the four-day Democratic National convention in Chicago.

Republicans, meanwhile, are planning counter-programming efforts in a bid to neutralize the several days’ worth of positive headlines and news coverage coming Harris’s way over the next week.