Political observers got an unexpected shock Saturday evening when the most respected pollster in the game, Iowa’s Ann Selzer, released her final pre-Election Day poll — and it showed Kamala Harris up by three points over Iowa in the red state, which supported Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. The Des Moines Register polling result is a strong positive sign in Harris’ favor in the closing days of the 2024 campaign, with Iowa women overwhelmingly supporting Harris.
In September, Trump was up by 4 points in the same poll.
“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” Selzer said.
The results show independent women and older women with striking support for Harris, as independent women back her by a 28-point margin and senior women by a 35-point margin.
As polarizing poll aggregator Nate Silver put it in a post on X, “So much for my Saturday night plans.” He added, “It is incredibly gutsy to release this poll. It won’t put Harris ahead in our forecast because there was also another Iowa poll out today that was good for Trump. But wouldn’t want to play poker against Ann Selzer.”
It’s particularly striking this year, as prominent journalists who focus on the quantitative side of polling have pointed to strong evidence of “poll herding” — the practice of weighting results in such a way that it obscures that your poll may be an outlier compared with others. The logic behind doing that is to protect your reputation and to avoid the kind of business hit a pollster can take if it’s seen as being unreliable.
Selzer has proven on point time and again over the years, even when most other pollsters missed in Iowa and elsewhere. If she ends up being accurate once again and Harris somehow managed to win in Iowa, it would likely be part of a wider victory for Harris, if not a landslide.
Social media users expressed their outright shock at the results Saturday evening.
