Who Is Ann Selzer and Why Am I Hanging My Sanity on Her?
Where were you when you learned about the jaw-dropping Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll showing Vice-President Kamala Harris three points ahead of Donald Trump in Iowa? I was doomscrolling at home after unsuccessfully trying to tamp down my election anxiety with back-to-back Real Housewives of New York episodes when it dropped Saturday night. I then frantically texted all my friends, spreading the word like Paul Revere, as Swing Left’s head of communications, Nick Hutchins, put it on X.
Bringing the Selzer poll to every group chat and Slack channel like Paul Revere
— Nick Hutchins (@nicholasrhutch) November 2, 2024
If, like me, you hate looking at polls in general, you may also be wondering what is so special about this one. Iowa is not a state that most experts would consider in play in the presidential race, and the 47-to-44 percent result is within the margin of error. But the Des Moines Register survey was conducted by J. Ann Selzer, one of the best, if not the best, pollsters in the United States. Selzer has been in the field since the late 1980s, and her track record is nearly flawless — in the past 12 years, she’s only been wrong about the result of the 2018 Iowa gubernatorial race. In 2016, her surveys were the canary in the coal mine: While most pollsters had Hillary Clinton definitely winning the election, Selzer bucked conventional wisdom and found that the Democratic nominee would likely lose Iowa, foreshadowing what would later happen across the country. And when many pollsters in 2020 had President Joe Biden winning the race decisively, Selzer’s final poll hinted at how the election would ultimately be decided by razor-thin margins due to Trump’s strength among blue-collar and independent voters.
Final Selzer poll findings (and the actual result)
— Matthew Klein (@MattKleinOnline) November 2, 2024
2022 Senate: R+12 (R+12)
2020 President: R+7 (R+8)
2020 Senate: R+4 (R+7)
2018 Governor: D+2 (R+3)
2016 President: R+7 (R+9)
2014 Senate: R+7 (R+8)
2012 President: D+5 (D+6)
About as good as any pollster gets. https://t.co/OfFO6ePDLy
So does this mean that Harris is about to flip Iowa, a state that Trump easily won in back-to-back elections? Not necessarily. Another poll released on Saturday by Emerson College Polling/RealClearDefense shows the former president with a ten-point lead over Harris in the state. But even if Selzer’s poll is an outlier, the results give us a glimpse of larger trends that can spell trouble for Trump and Republicans on Election Day. His showing in Iowa shrank from 18 points over Biden in June to a three-point deficit in the last days of the race because of women voters, according to Selzer. “Age and gender are the two most dynamic factors that are explaining these numbers,” she told the Des Moines Register. The poll shows that women who identify as independent support Harris over Trump by a 28-point margin, and that women who are 65 and older favor Harris over Trump 63 percent to 28 percent. In an interview with The Bulwark, Selzer pointed out Iowa’s six-week abortion ban went into effect this summer and that this could potentially be a driving force in the state’s congressional races as well as the presidential contest. About 22 percent of Harris’s supporters in the state said abortion was their most important issue this election, and, well, women 65 and older do remember a time before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion care nationwide.
Political observers are seeing this dynamic play out in other parts of the country, too. Michael McDonald, a politics professor at the University of Florida who specializes in U.S. elections, noted that a recent Kansas poll showed similar trends. There, too, older women decisively broke for Harris, and Trump’s 14-point lead in 2020 has shrunk to just five points today. If these polls are even remotely accurate and Trump’s lead has narrowed in Republican strongholds, he may face considerable challenges securing victories elsewhere.
Here's the kicker for the Kansas Speaks poll. Harris' surprising strength comes from older people with a large gender gap. The same dynamic as Selzer's poll pic.twitter.com/K54kjILbzO
— Michael McDonald (@ElectProject) November 4, 2024
Trump and his allies were of course not happy about the Iowa poll. At a rally in Pennsylvania on Sunday, he called Selzer one of his “enemies.” Trump also went on a tear against the pollster over on TruthSocial. “No President has done more for FARMERS, and the Great State of Iowa, than Donald J. Trump. In fact, it’s not even close!” he posted. “All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT.”
Selzer has stood up for her methodology and results while doing the media rounds. And to be fair, she did call Trump’s win both in 2016 and 2020. “I’m a big believer of keeping my dirty fingers out of the data. We did it the way we did it,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Sunday. “When he won in our final poll twice in two election cycles — very same method.” In roughly 36 hours, we’ll learn whether she was right again.