Is Ann Selzer going to retire? I’m tossing that out there because she was a credible pollster until she dropped what arguably is a suppression poll showing that Kamala Harris was leading Donald Trump 47-44 in Iowa days before voters headed in to cast their ballots. The state was Trump +18 in June. It went Kamala +3 during the summer, and no one noticed. The woman, long viewed as the gold standard in this field, wrecked her credibility in one swoop. Her poll is now the subject of an internal investigation at Gannett, the publisher of The Des Moines Register, as someone at the paper leaked it to Democrats before it went public.
So, what went wrong, Ann? Trump carried Iowa in 2024 by 14 points. Everyone and their mother knew Trump would take the state, so why even release this poll? What the hell happened? This was more than a bit outside. Selzer explains that her poll animated the GOP voters in the state to turn out and vote:
In response to a critique that I “manipulated” the data, or had been paid (by some anonymous source, presumably on the Democratic side), or that I was exercising psyops or some sort of voter suppression: I told more than one news outlet that the findings from this last poll could actually energize and activate Republican voters who thought they would likely coast to victory. Maybe that’s what happened.
In 2004, the final Iowa Poll had John Kerry with a small 3-point lead over President George W. Bush. In the end, Bush won Iowa by less than a percentage point. I had the good fortune to run into former Gov. Terry Branstad, who gave me a masterclass on why things move late. He credited an enormous rally in Sioux City, closed to the press, with activating a turnout strategy he thought led to a substantial widening of the Bush winning margin in the 5th Congressional District in western Iowa. He also suspected that rally was the cause of Sen. Tom Daschle getting drummed out of office in South Dakota.
That story stays with me now. But, what other stories are out there to explain the miss? We’ll be looking at turnout rates at the polls and comparing them to our demographic mix. We’ll be looking at what amount to tea leaves in our poll about the trending story about Black and Latino men’s growing alignment with Trump and his policies. We’ll be looking at how the late deciders fell, if we can figure that out without a traditional exit poll for Iowa.
Or, Ann, now hear me out: Trump had a double-digit lead over Kamala and maintained that lead because he would never lose the state. What the hell is this explanation? My poll caused Republicans to turn out—they would always turn out. The GOP was jacked for this election; Kamala’s people were not, and it feeds into this cockamamie narrative that a) silent GOP voters were backing Kamala and b) the women’s vote would wash away Trumpism from the American political landscape. Both were myths.
"I was wrong, but maybe my poll caused GOP turnout to increase even though it’s a ruby red state that even Kamala’s people knew they had no shot at winning" is quite the takeaway here.