If you were following the last week of the election closely you know that one of the stories that electrified Democrats was the release of a poll by a well known pollster named Ann Selzer. The poll showed Kamala Harris leading by 3 points in Iowa. The impact of this was like a bomb going off. Indeed some people on Twitter compared it to a nuclear blast.
— Ben DuBose (@BenDuBose) November 2, 2024
Reporters vouched for Selzer's poll as the "gold standard."
This is a gold-standard poll. Perhaps an outlier, but this is a state Trump won easily twice. https://t.co/sW4hMqlkrZ
— Trip Gabriel (@tripgabriel) November 2, 2024
Some suggested this poll was the cause of a drop in Trump's odds on Polymarket.
🚨BREAKING: Donald Trump’s Polymarket odds are plummeting as the market reacts to the Iowa Selzer poll showing him losing in that state.
— Franklin (@franklinisbored) November 2, 2024
Kamala Harris is gaining ground.
What went wrong? pic.twitter.com/nOIzIEPvAQ
Others were quick to extrapolate and celebrate what this meant for the entire race.
If IOWA is even close, it would mean that the best use of @realDonaldTrump’s time now would be to get fitted for some nice orange jumpsuits he’s going to need very soon. https://t.co/5TgzsGcUmI
— George Conway (@gtconway3d) November 2, 2024
NY Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote a column on election eve describing how her shocked reaction to the poll frightened her whole family.
On Saturday evening I was watching a movie with my family when a text message made me gasp so hard that it scared them. “What happened?” my husband asked, worried. “Nothing bad,” I said, slightly overcome. “It’s just … Ann Selzer has Harris up three in Iowa!”...
So many of us were anxious to see how big Trump’s lead would be this time, and the fact that Selzer instead found him losing came as a shock. The poll may easily turn out to be wrong; Selzer’s record is as good as anyone’s in the business, but it’s not perfect. Should Kamala Harris win this election, though, the poll will be part of the story of her victory.
But as we all know now, Kamala Harris was never leapfrogging anyone in Iowa. In fact, Trump won the state by 13 points, making this a 16 point miss. Today Selzer wrote a column for the Des Moines Register in which she said she was still trying to understand how "the team" got the results so wrong.
What a big miss for The Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll. It followed an unprecedented worldwide fascination with an outlier poll showing Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by 3 percentage points.
The final poll followed a surprising September poll showing the vice president had closed Trump’s lead over Biden in a June poll by 14 points. So, the October poll appeared the next step in an upward progression for Harris. Except that turned out not to be true.
The team at Selzer & Company has begun a review to raise any plausible question of what happened between Thursday night the previous week, when we finished interviewing, and when the votes were tallied on Tuesday night. That work has begun, but it will be awhile before it is complete.
Selzer says she's been receiving a lot of phone calls and emails asking if she manipulated the data in some way. Her response has been to suggest that maybe her poll galvanized GOP voters.
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.
Maybe. Or maybe this was just a terrible poll that gave unfounded hope to a lot of desperate Democrats looking for any reason to believe a blue wave was coming. If anything, the suggestion that Trump was behind in a deep red state he'd won twice before would have been more likely to discourage his voters rather than fire them up.
Anyway, I don't really have any personal views about Ann Selzer. People do make mistakes, even big ones, from time to time. Frankly, her lame attempt to spin this into a pro-Trump story is the most suspicious thing about all of this. Just admit you blew it. We don't need a new theory about how maybe you were key to the whole outcome of the election.
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