What the surprising poll from Iowa means

At the weekend, the US election campaign experienced a small “November surprise”: a survey suddenly saw Kamala Harris in the lead in Iowa. Iowa, a state that was actually not an option for the Democrats in 2024. What that – possibly – says about the election outcome.

J. Ann Selzer’s surveys are considered particularly good; they are among the best in the country. They have a reputation for being very accurate, particularly due to their performance from 2008 to 2020. That much is certain – even if Donald Trump recently claimed otherwise and attacked the 68-year-old head-on.

He did this, of course, because he didn’t like Selzer’s latest poll at all. Their institute Selzer & Company published the latest data on the voting intention of people in Iowa over the weekend. And they managed to surprise: Kamala Harris suddenly led by three percentage points.

Iowa, a “solidly Republican” state in the Midwest

This is surprising because Iowa is not actually a swing state. In 2020, Trump won here by a margin of eight percentage points, four years earlier by nine. Iowa is rated “solidly Republican” by the independent Cook Political Report.

Now, of course, an individual survey must be placed in relation to its peers. Any analysis that looks at a single survey in isolation will be incomplete and possibly flawed. Because the fact is that Selzer’s data is the only one so far that sees Harris ahead in Iowa. In every other poll this year, Trump has had a lead of at least four percentage points. All poll averages show the Republican ahead by several percentage points – even taking the latest data into account. In addition, the three percentage points by which Selzer sees Harris in the lead are still just within the statistical error range of 3.4 points.

So why should you care about Selzer’s survey?

J. Ann Selzer, the runaway queen

Well, on the one hand, due to the above-mentioned fact that the data from the institute founded in 1996 by J. Ann Selzer is among the most accurate in the country. And on the other hand, because Selzer & Company has not found itself in this situation for the first time, as the New York Times shows today.

In the final week before the 2020 election, the institute released a poll in Iowa that showed Trump leading that state by seven percentage points. That was an outlier: Other polls showed a much closer race, with Trump ahead by just over a point on average. Selzer’s own poll two months earlier had shown a tie between Trump and Joe Biden.

In the end, Trump won the state with six electoral votes, 53 percent to 45 percent – ​​eight percentage points.

She has been the outlier queen so many times, J. Ann Selzer told the New York Times. “I’m not jumpy.” The 2016 survey also underlines this: At that time, Selzer saw Trump with a seven-point lead, although the polls overall gave him a much smaller three-point lead. He won state that year by nine points.

And the story goes back even further: In 2008, Selzer released a poll that showed a relatively unknown, Black senator from Illinois was leading in the 2008 Iowa Democratic primary—a big surprise even to pundits and analysts. The senator was Barack Obama, who famously won the Iowa caucuses and overall, clearing his path to the presidential nomination and ultimately to the White House.

When even your own results are questioned

But although J. Ann Selzer is used to producing the outlier in the polls, she says that she too had to swallow empty at first.

According to the NYT, opinion researchers in the USA sometimes succumb to a phenomenon known as “herd instinct”. This happens when institutes only publish their results if they agree with what has already been determined in other or previous surveys. But J. Ann Selzer’s willingness to publish her results even when they are outliers is one of the reasons she is widely considered a trustworthy pollster.

She never, ever believed that her institute would have a lead from Harris. However, after double checking, analyzing and discussing the data, it was concluded that there were no obvious errors.

On the contrary, she even found some underlying results that could explain what may have happened.

More women want to go to the polls

A possible trend towards Harris had already emerged in a previous survey she conducted in Iowa. This still saw Trump in the lead by four percentage points in September. However, that was already slightly less than in June. But it was above all another trend that emerged.

In this and the last Selzer survey, the proportion of respondents who said they were very likely to vote (or had already done so in the last survey) was clearly higher than in the June survey.

In particular, there were more female, younger and educated voters who said they now wanted to go to the polls.

In the most recent poll, a majority of voters aged 65 and over also supported Harris. This is primarily due to women: 63 percent of women aged 65 and over said they wanted to vote for Harris (versus 28 percent) – an extremely large lead. And independent voters, especially independent women, also leaned toward Democrats in the new survey.

Selzer says: “It’s like people got up from the bench and said, ‘Okay, I’m going to vote.’ And they were Harris supporters.”

It’s quite possible that Selzer’s survey is an outlier because their surveys can also be wrong. It’s also quite possible that Iowa will actually vote Democratic, but will become a national outlier. Still, the NYT concludes: “Even if Harris doesn’t win Iowa, the idea of ​​her making gains in a Midwestern state could give Democrats some hope for their chances in battleground states.”

Selzer said she is prepared for Trump to win in Iowa in the end and is not worried that her poll could then be wrong. At the end of the day she will either be “golden” – or the “skunk” among the opinion researchers. How would she react to that? «I’ll take it like a big girl. I won’t shed any tears.”

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