Ann Selzer thought she could ride into the sunset after retiring from the political polling business after the 2024 election. She grossly miscalculated. Though it’s unlikely this will head to trial, Donald Trump sued her and the Des Moines Register for the laughably inaccurate poll that showed Kamala Harris winning the state by 3 points in the election's final days. Trump ended up winning Iowa by 14 points.
In June, Iowa leaned heavily for Trump. He held a decisive 16-point lead over Biden. That didn’t change after the July coup, and there’s no way a shift of that magnitude would have gone unnoticed. It would have reverberated in other states as well.
It was patently false. Selzer stood by her survey, claiming the poll might have reenergized the GOP base there. Doubtful. Trump was ahead and remained ahead. The president-elect alleges election interference due to the timing, the fake crosstabs, and the media coverage that came with it. Also, how did Democrats know about this poll hours before it dropped? Who leaked it?
The media harping on this fake poll is what Jennings brought up, whereas every liberal on the panel said that past surveys have been wrong and that there’s no there there. Are we going to sue pollsters who get it wrong? It’s not about that, and the red wave mirage of 2022 isn’t the same thing. This error goes beyond repeated cycles of pollsters oversampling Republicans as they did in the 2022 midterms.
JUST IN: CNN’s Scott Jennings causes entire panel to meltdown after he called out people accused of rigging polls like Ann Selzer.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 18, 2024
The liberal panel members all just thought it was one big accident that pollster Ann Selzer was 16 points off in Iowa.
“It's not about the poll,… pic.twitter.com/SzBFRHAteY
This Selzer poll was facially untrue—laughably false—and they still ran with it. It goes beyond a point or two off. Heck, even a 3-to-5-point margin of error is still acceptable. Selzer talked about an unheard-of swing, unseen in the data and impossible given how the Harris campaign had conducted itself. The poll was believed, as Lindy Li, a Democratic fundraiser, remembers so vividly of her colleagues telling her that Iowa was in the bag for Harris, leading her to become increasingly skeptical of the vice president’s operation.
Lindi Li was a donor and fundraiser for Kamala Harris. She lays it all out from inside the campaign as to why they failed and also demonstrates that the information desert wasn't just in the DNC media but even withing the inner circles of the Harris Campaign. pic.twitter.com/kriprq1W7q
— Trey Dean (@treyedean) November 9, 2024
It's no secret that Quinnipiac, Public Policy Polling, and the like lean Democratic. That’s very different than allegedly knowingly dropping a fake suppression poll to muddy the cycle and give some propaganda meat to the liberal media sphere to be an opiate for their masses. Iowa would never be a state where Harris could pull this off anyway. Obama won Iowa twice, and like Comet Hyakutake, that won’t be seen again for another 70,000 years.
Also, was that Michael Cohen making some sense there, just then?