Vice President JD Vance took issue with a late January Fox News poll showing voters preferred Democrats over Republicans heading into 2026 midterm election season, as he made the case to voters about the administration’s achievements so far.
During an interview on Tuesday with anchor Martha MacCallum, Vance claimed Fox News always had the “worst” polls.
“I will say, as much as we love Fox News, we always think Fox News has the worst polling,” Vance said as he chuckled. “Me and the president agree on that. I’m sorry. It’s true.”
Vance pivoted to touting the administration’s economic record, claiming American voters should celebrate that they were about $1,200 richer since the Trump administration took office, though he didn’t cite the source of that statistic.
“If you’re looking at it from the perspective of the last year, Americans have done better,” Vance added. “If you look at it from the perspective of the Biden administration, we’re still digging out of the hole Democrats put us in.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Vance mocked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent, at-times vague remarks at the Munich Security Conference, and downplayed speculation that he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are quietly becoming rivals for the 2028 presidential nomination.
Recent polling suggests Democrats have the upper hand going into the midterms, where affordability and other economic issues are expected to be key topics.
The Trump economy has been a mixed bag, with low inflation and a high-performing stock market, while job growth has been meager and the Trump tariffs have caused global economic uncertainty and failed to generate a promised boom in manufacturing employment so far.
“The worst calamity that everyone had in mind didn’t happen,” Jeffrey Cleveland, chief economist at Payden & Rygel, recently told The Wall Street Journal. “People would say to me, ‘The only way you’ll get to 2 percent inflation is the unemployment rate has to spike.’”
That hasn’t happened, but the U.S. economy only added an average of 15,000 jobs a month throughout the last year, a historically poor showing for a non-recession year.
“The labor market has been objectively weak,” he added.
Elsewhere, the Trump administration’s signature tax bill has concentrated the vast majority of its likely benefits among the wealthiest fifth of Americans, according to an analysis from the Institution on Taxation and Economic Policy, while the White House still has not yet passed the GOP’s long-promised plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, even as health subsidies expired last year.
Meanwhile, the administration’s military-style immigration operations in cities like Minneapolis have continued to generate controversy.
Six in ten Americans believe Trump has “gone too far” in his immigration agenda, a recent AP-NORC poll found.
Vance, in his Fox News interview, said neither he nor the president liked the “videos” out of Minneapolis, where federal agents fatally shot two Americans protesting immigration operations in January.
The vice president blamed immigration “chaos” on sanctuary jurisdictions that do not proactively cooperate with immigration authorities.
“Where you have that chaos in Los Angeles, in Minneapolis, it’s because the local authorities are so committed to an open border that they want to put law enforcement at risk,” Vance said. “We’re not going to surrender to that.”
In Minnesota, local leaders say, state jails and county sheriffs already cooperate with immigration enforcement to release migrants into federal custody, though cities like Minneapolis do not partner with federal officials to make immigration arrests.
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