Sure, “renowned Iowa pollster” J. Ann Selzer has been wrong before. But this kind of wrong in the polling business can leave a mark.
Selzer grabbed a lot of headlines a few days before the election (and not just from her home newspaper and Democrat Party shill, the Des Moines Register) with the shocking poll she did tracking the political sentiments of Hawkeye State voters. The Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll conducted by Selzer showed Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ replacement presidential candidate, leading former President Donald Trump, the GOP’s presidential nominee, by 3 percentage points (47 percent to 44 percent) in deep red Iowa.
It seemed insane, because it was.
Not Seeing Red
Iowa was called for Trump by The Associated Press less than two hours after the state’s polls closed. With an estimated 95 percent of the vote counted as of publication, Trump is clobbering by 14 percentage points (56.3 percent to 42.3 percent), according to the Washington Post.
Trump won Iowa by nearly 10 percentage points in 2016, and by about 8 points in 2020, according to The New York Times.
While the “red wave” predicted ahead of the 2022 midterms did not hit nationwide, it did hit Iowa. Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds easily won reelection, and Republicans seized control of all of the Hawkeye state’s House seats.
For the better part of a very long year, the first-in-the-nation caucus state showed Republicans from the start were firmly behind Trump. The former president outdistanced his nearest competitor in the Republican primary field by about 30 points, smashing the margin of victory for a contested Iowa caucus.
But, just days before the 2024 election Selzer and the Des Moines Register looked past all of that redness, and apparently felt the good vibes and “joy” of the Harris campaign would be enough to put Iowa back into the blue.
“Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in Iowa — a startling reversal for Democrats and Republicans who have all but written off the state’s presidential contest as a certain Trump victory,” the Des Moines Register declared in a story published Saturday, with the headline advertising the poll reading: “Kamala Harris leapfrogs Donald Trump to take lead near election.”
“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., according to the Register. “She [Harris] has clearly leaped into a leading position.”
Clearly, Harris had not.
‘Monkey Wrench’
It’s not surprising that usual election interference suspects in corporate media ate up the Des Moines Register poll mere days before the 2024 election, with many outlets perpetuating and defending it.
Over the weekend, Newsweek reported that Selzer “has a reputation for being highly accurate when it comes to last minute polls with surprise results.”
Rick Klein, ABC News Washington bureau chief and political director, thought the extreme outlier poll threw a “monkey wrench” into the final days of the campaign.
“There aren’t many people who think Donald Trump is going to suddenly lose the state that he won by eight points, but it might indicate some of the weakness he has with voters in other states, including Wisconsin and Michigan,” Klein said of the Des Moines Register’s latest poll in an ABC News story.
But no one who knows anything about Iowa politics or hasn’t been lobotomized saw Selzer’s numbers for what they were: garbage.
Trump claimed the poll was a form of voter “suppression” and that it “should be illegal,” according to Newsweek. Now, he is the projected winner of the presidential election, and, potentially of the popular vote — and Iowa remains a very red state.
“Ann Selzer’s wrong! The Des Moines Register’s wrong! Donald Trump just won Iowa!” State Party Chair Jeff Kaufmann said at Iowa’s GOP election night watch party, the Register reported. Kaufmann reportedly said the outlandish outlier poll “energized Republicans.”
She’s been wrong before. In 2004, the Iowa Poll showed Democrat John Kerry ahead of incumbent Republican President George W. Bush by 5 percentage points, as the Register explained. Bush squeaked out a win in Iowa, but Selzer has had a pretty good run for several election cycles.
Not this one.
Selzer said she would be “reviewing her data” to figure out why it was “so far out of line with former President Donald Trump’s resounding victory,” the Register reported Tuesday night
“Tonight, I’m of course thinking about how we got where we are,” Selzer said in a statement, according to the outlet.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
