Trump's lead in Pennsylvania is gone. Vance's solution: Just don't believe it. No, really.

PHILADELPHIA — JD Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio chosen as a running mate five weeks ago by former President Donald Trump, came to this overwhelmingly Democratic city Monday with a tough assignment.

Trump's lead in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania has evaporated over the past month as Vice President Kamala Harris' nascent presidential campaign has enjoyed a vibe-driven surge in polling, fundraising and momentum.

Harris and her running mate, Minn. Gov. Tim Walz, are likely to enjoy yet another bounce this week from the political pageantry of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Vance, seeking to kill the Democratic vibe, cast Harris as a danger to America's economy while speaking to a small crowd of supporters in the warehouse of a medical waste management company.

How would he clean up the troubling optics of losing the lead in Pennsylvania?

Vance's answer: Just don't believe polls.

JD Vance visits Pennsylvania as Trump drops in polling

The math is real, even as Vance discounts it. Pennsylvania is now a statistical tie between Harris and Trump, according to an average of polls compiled by RealClearPolitics.

Trump's Pennsylvania lead stood at 4.5 percentage points on July 21, the day President Joe Biden dropped his bid for a second term and endorsed Harris as his replacement at the top of the ticket.

I asked Vance if he believed in the polling and, if so, how he and Trump would make up that ground.

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"I don't believe the polls when they say that we're up," Vance told me. "I don't believe the polls that say that we're tied. I don't believe the polls that say that we're down."

That's it? Vance's approach to data that helps frame a political challenge is to … just look away? He's going to need a villain here to make that fly. Of course, he found one.

"I believe that the media puts out these polls, knowing that it's going to depress turnout and it's going to make the conversation about the polls," Vance said. "Who cares what the polls say, whether they say we're up or we're down?"

Donald Trump has been obsessed with polls

I can answer that question. Trump cares. He cares so, so much, just like he obsesses about crowd sizes when his rallies are compared with Harris' ? and how he always wants to know if his televised speeches get the best ratings.

How do we know? Because Trump loved to post about the polling in Pennsylvania when things were going his way, back before the entire election changed on a Sunday in July.

Trump posted in May about an AARP poll showing him "pulling away" from Biden in Pennsylvania. In June, he posted about a Washington Post poll that found voters in Pennsylvania and other swing states trusted him more than Biden.

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Last week, during a disjointed ramble fest pitched as a news conference, Trump insisted, "We're leading in the polls. For the most part, we're leading in the polls. We were leading Biden by a lot. We're leading now. But I think, when she's exposed, I think we're going to beat her by a lot more than we would have beaten Biden by."

Presidential elections are won in swing states like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin. But national polls provide a sense of the electorate. Trump is not "leading in the polls." The RealClearPolitics polling average at the national level on Monday gave Harris a 1.5 percentage point edge over Trump.

That's razor-thin. But it's a lead. For her. Not him.

Trump's stop in Pennsylvania was filled with more of his style of politics

Trump had his own tough assignment Monday in York, Pennsylvania, where he visited another industrial plant for what his campaign called "remarks on the economy." It was another ramble fest, a rehashed bag of old bromides about "communists" and "Marxists" and "drill, baby, drill" and such and so on.

Trump knocked Harris for flipping her position on "fracking," the process used to extract natural gas in places like Pennsylvania. Harris, while running for president in 2020, proposed banning the practice, which has a significant impact on the state's economics and environment.

Fair game, right? She changed her position. That should be part of the conversation in this campaign. But Trump, being Trump, has to overplay that hand.

"Kamala is also on a regulatory jihad to shut down power plants all across America," Trump declared in York in the sort of emotional rhetoric that he deploys when he feels a sense of control in the race slipping away.

Pennsylvania will be a polling focal point for the rest of this election

Chicago and the Democratic National Convention are the center of the election universe right now, but Pennsylvania is so clearly in play that the Trump and Harris campaigns had to make multiple stops here from Saturday to Monday.

Harris and Walz used a bus tour of western Pennsylvania, where she told supporters: "The vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us."

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Trump held another rally in Wilkes-Barre, where he added a new bit of weird to his standard stump speech, claiming he's "much better looking" than Harris.

We'll all probably be sick of the term "vibe" by Election Day on Nov. 5. (It's certainly possible we've already reached that point.) But it's worth noting the very different sentiments emanating from the presidential campaigns.

Harris is running a happy, energetic road show, trying to evoke unity. Trump, by contrast, is a prophet of impending doom with a fixation on division.

The election is 11 weeks away. If both camps stick with that messaging, the polls will keep going in the wrong direction for Trump. And just disbelieving the data won't save his campaign.

Follow USA TODAY elections columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: JD Vance in Pennsylvania says polls don't matter. Tell that to Trump.