Pollster Behind Massively Botched Iowa Poll Showing Kamala Leading Deflects Blame
Ann Selzer claims her 17-point miss may have been due to Republican voters being “energized” and “activated” by her poll showing Kamala up by 3 points.
Ann Selzer, the lead pollster for the Des Moines Register and up until Tuesday one of the most respected pollsters in America, released what will likely become the most memorable poll of the 2024 election cycle. The shock poll, released on Saturday night, found that Vice President Kamala Harris led President-elect Donald Trump by 3 points in the red state of Iowa.
The headline in the Register read: “Iowa poll: Kamala Harris leapfrogs Donald Trump to take lead near Election Day.” The lede said: “The nationally recognized Iowa Poll shows Kamala Harris picking up support from women to surpass Donald Trump in a ruby-red state he has won twice.”
Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in Iowa — a startling reversal for Democrats and Republicans who have all but written off the state’s presidential contest as a certain Trump victory.
— Ben DuBose (@BenDuBose) November 2, 2024
A September iteration of the poll showed Trump with a 4-point lead over Harris. The June version of the poll showed Trump with an 18-point lead over President Joe Biden.
An hour before this poll was released, an Emerson College poll showed Trump with a 10-point lead over Harris in the state.
Selzer’s result came as a lightning bolt. The news delighted Democrats who thought that if Harris was outperforming in a red state, she could be headed for a national landslide.
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
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
I'm going to put this video in a time capsule, open it up in 20 years, and laugh my ass off again 🤣 pic.twitter.com/liPvxu1R2p
— Vince Langman (@LangmanVince) November 8, 2024
Conversely, it sent the GOP into a collective state of apoplexy. Most Republicans did not believe the Iowa Poll. Some even saw it as a “suppression poll” designed to discourage Republican turnout on Election Day. After all, if your candidate is probably going to lose, why go to the trouble of casting your vote?
Up until Trump’s 13.2% victory over Harris in the state showed Selzer’s poll to be likely the worst call of the season, she had enjoyed a sterling reputation for accuracy and integrity.
Ann Selzer caused shockwaves this weekend with her poll that showed Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump in Iowa.
But how has she become the gold standard of pollsters? She sat down with us in 2020 to explain her rigorous methodology. pic.twitter.com/zXtT0sxEPq
— The Recount (@therecount) November 4, 2024
Famed Pollster Ann Selzer Says This Is Why Harris is Ahead. Heard her on Morning Joe. Smart Cookie! https://t.co/VXpLkZpBBS
— B. Sargent Noble (@schpsych8) November 4, 2024
In a Thursday op-ed published by the Register, Selzer exclaimed, “What a big miss for The Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll.” I’ll say!
Selzer told readers:
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.
Then, Selzer laughably suggested that her poll (or rather the Iowa Poll, because she didn’t want to take sole responsibility for this turkey) may have actually “energized” and “activated” Republican voters who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered casting a vote. In other words, as Fox News reported it, “Iowa pollster Ann Selzer suggests her data could have galvanized Republican voters into proving it wrong.”
At any rate, Selzer continued:
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.
Or maybe that’s not what happened! We know that outlier polls happen in every election cycle. But this one was a doozy. It will live in infamy right alongside the ABC News/Washington Post poll (released on Oct. 28, 2020) that showed Biden ahead of Trump in Wisconsin by 17 points.
Although we don’t expect outliers to come from our top pollsters, it happens. But instead of trying to portray herself as some sort of savior for the GOP, Selzer might have tried a little humility.
Iowa pollster Ann Selzer suggests her data could have galvanized Republican voters into proving it wrong https://t.co/QmR1ByRrkL
— Fox News (@FoxNews) November 8, 2024
Yeah that’s what happened. pic.twitter.com/BEyTngKHLY
— MaryAnnNotGinger 💋 (@MAnotGinger) November 8, 2024
Elizabeth writes commentary for The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a member of the Editorial Board at The Sixteenth Council, a London think tank. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
I heard she was gonna sue the people she polled because they like lied to her and stuff.
She’s going to have to sue herself if she’s going after people who lied.
Poll was AWFUL, generated by an AWFL
wonder if she could get a job in Vegas setting odds ??
A suspicious person would follow the money
I hope she thought it was worth it, trashing her own reputation to try to influence turnout for KAMala.
“The dog ate my polling data” — Ann Selzer
“… and then some Haitians ate my dog.”
The Haitians like cats.
It was Barack Obama who ate the dog.
People of Springfield please don’t eat my cat. Why would you do that? Eat something else…
This excuse is awfully similar to some obnoxious, heavy set, feminist woman with hair dyed in toxic colors and more piercings than toes claiming she doesn’t have a husband b/c ‘men are intimidated by her’. Nah sis it’s b/c you are an unpleasant, abrasive jerk demanding the rest of the world revolve around you without any redeeming qualities.
Seltzer was pretty influential pollster and chose to blow up her professional reputation b/c….reasons…..who now continues to double down on lying and deceit after being exposed as a sellout hack.
I think the word she is looking for is ‘nauseated’ not ‘intimidated’
It’s a Democrat thing. They call everything a “phobia” that’s really a “nausea.”
She must be dating George Conway.
Poor bas*d. He won’t be getting any.
I would have thought that after 2016 people would have stopped listening to polls but Ricki just can’t help herself chortling over this as evidence Trump is actually Hitler and Harris is going to take him down. Sorry, Ricki. Your TDS led you astray and you with your 57 viewers all suck.
That this wasn’t a suppression poll is rank BS. I’m amazed her nose isn’t two or three feet long lying like that. I’ve seen a little history on this chick and know a little about Iowa politics.
Her ‘sterling reputation’ largely comes from forecasting GOP wins statewide and select local Democrat wins in Iowa over the last decade. That’s the polling equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. Iowa has been R+ for years and the areas of Democrat dominance are well known.
None of her final calls have ever overstated the margin for a Republican.
Her two biggest misses, before this whopper, were Kim Reynolds winning the Governorship in 2018 (prediction was D+3, Reynolds won by 2) and Joni Ernst’s reelection to the Senate in 2020 (prediction R+3, Ernst won in a +7 rout). In both cases those were races that Iowa Democrats were desperate to win.
Yeah, she’s a hack.
When D and R confuse you. You’re not pollster.
I don’t think these people are incompetent. They are doing exactly what they are paid to do. What they truly lack is ethics and credibility. Similarly, who knows what Joy Reid actually thinks. I highly expact that she and everyone on the View, and the Lame Night Hosts, are all paid handsomly to trumpet a viewpoint that is fed to them. As JR Ewing put it, “once you lose your integrity, the rest is simple.”
If she has a history of being wrong, then that needs to come up everytime she opens her yap from now on. As a pollster, she will have a track record, and her value is based on that track record. Sure, she can make up numbers for a price, but if no one believes those numbers, then she has no further value.
Yeah, if only the real world really worked like that.
The gun ban lobby has a 100% record of being wrong about their predictions of “blood in the streets and Dodge City over fender benders” every time some state or municipality does anything to relax restrictions on gun ownership or carry. Find me one media outlet that has ever said, “We’re not even going to call these clowns for comment from now on.”
Ever notice that these wild outlier polls never happen in places that are safe for Democrats like California and New York? Or that they never show the Republican way up when he’s really not?
Such strange coincidences. There’s just no explanation.
She has the Democrat way of excusing everything. It wasn’t my fault but if it was I created the big surge of Republicans. Either way, the Dems now hate her.
A similar thing happened in Kansas. Shortly before the election date the Docking Institute at Ft Hays State University published its poll showing Trump ahead by 5 points. This shocked many as Trump had won by well over 10% in 2016 and 2020. Of course he won Kansas 2024 by over 16 points. So only an 11 point miss. The poll also happened to ask about legalizing weed and medicaid expansion showing strong support for both. That poll now being cited by media to put pressure on the Kansas legislature to pass both in the upcoming session. It seems safe to assume the support for those measures is as questionable as the assertion of Trump being ahead only 5 points. FWIW Docking is named after a notoriously liberal but popular former governor.
She was obviously “thinking” with her pink pussy hat on. No logical human being would’ve thought there wasn’t something wrong with a shift that dramatic in such a short time. Polls just don’t suddenly change without some kind of catastrophic event.
But, to quote Hillary, “what difference … does it make?” If Kamala was losing in Iowa, there was no more to do about it. The Iowans had decided against her.
Unless it’s like Hillary’s pollster in Michigan in 2016. Hillary had apparently been told she would win Michigan, if they recounted the inner city Detroit area 6 times. That’s what they did as we learned in the recount Jill Stein demanded. (Then Jill Stein stopped demanding recounts of states Trump won narrowly.)
Iowans probably decided to tell this pollster to f off. After all, I cannot imagine how someone could vote for two incompetent evil fakers for president and VP, but I’d be happy to lie to them to help them lose.
Selzer oversampled AWFLs around Des Moines, Ankeny, Quad Cities, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Waterloo/Cedar Falls, and other heavily Democrat areas in Iowa. She even admitted it when confronted. She’s done it before. The Des Moines Register has a track record of pulling this crap.
Ann, you over estimate your influence. You let your bias cloud your objectivity and shattered any credibility you had.
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