One of America’s Best Polls Sends Shockwaves Through the Election, Has Kamala Harris Winning in Iowa

By Jacob Weindling  |  November 3, 2024 | 10:10am
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Elections 2024 Election
One of America’s Best Polls Sends Shockwaves Through the Election, Has Kamala Harris Winning in Iowa

Many people spent their Saturday night doing normal Saturday night things. Hanging with friends, partying, trying new things, you know, the stuff most folks like to do on the weekends. Many of you may have been those people last night, enjoying your evening, before noticing someone out of the corner of your eye trying to stuff their eyeballs back into their sockets as they shoved their phone in the faces of everyone within an arm’s length of them. That person was me.

Many people who were enjoying their last Saturday night before we descend into whatever hell awaits us on the other side of Tuesday may not know the name Ann Selzer, but to election watchers, she is something like a modern version of an ancient sun God. When the poor, confused villagers duped by herded polling they know in their bones is lying to them need something real to hold on to, Selzer’s Des Moines Register poll has been there to center us. To prove to us political scientists that all that time and money was not a waste and there is actually something to this kind of thinking when applied properly. This is as good as polling in America gets.

So everyone was obviously waiting on pins and needles for the final pre-election Selzer poll. Not necessarily because anyone thought that Iowa was a competitive state, but because it has similar demographics to Wisconsin and Michigan and is a lens through which to look at the so-called blue firewall that will likely decide this election. Lest my right-wing haters think this is just a liberal echo chamber story I am elevating, perhaps no one hyped these poll results more than the chair of the Iowa Republican Party, Jeff Kaufmann. I don’t blame him, few people in America have been better at capturing late Trump movement in the polls than Sezler has.

Let’s go to the Des Moines Register to see the results of this highly anticipated poll. Liberals, get your fainting couches. No–not the ironic ones, the real ones.

A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Vice President Harris leading former President Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters just days before a high-stakes election that appears deadlocked in key battleground states.

Excuse me?

Similarly, senior voters who are 65 and older favor Harris. But senior women support her by a more than 2-to-1 margin, 63% to 28%,

Holy shit!

while senior men favor her by just 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%.

W H A T I S H A P P E N I N G

It is very, very easy to dismiss this poll as an outlier, and it likely is to some degree. No poll is perfect, lord knows I spent a lot of time this week detailing how most of them have herded themselves into uselessness–and Selzer has been wrong before–but what’s important to note is the magnitude here (it’s also important to note how gutsy it was to release this and not hedge her bets like all these other cowardly jabronis clearly are).

Trump won Iowa by 9.4 percent in 2016 and 8.2 percent in 2020. If this poll is off by double its margin of error in Trump’s favor, he can still likely kiss Wisconsin goodbye. For Iowa to be close, let alone in Kamala territory, let alone almost in Kamala territory outside the poll’s 3.4 percent margin of error, is…a development, to say the least. The fact that Iowa passed a six-week abortion ban that was upheld by its Supreme Court is inescapable in a world where support for legal abortion has risen since the United States Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe.

After the poll sent shockwaves through the political world, Giancarlo Sopo, a political communications strategist, wrote, “Tonight, I spoke with a senior Republican strategist, known for accurate polling in Iowa, who shared private data showing President Trump at +5 in the state.”

If the Des Moines Register poll had returned a Trump +5 result, they would still be partying at Harris HQ over it.

These were not the only two polls from this weekend which suggested there may be sirens flashing in the Midwest for Trump, as Lakshya Jain of Split Ticket released a Miami University of Ohio poll which had Trump winning the state by only three, a significant drop from his eight point victories there in 2016 and 2020. Trump’s Midwest red flags didn’t end there, as Editor-in-Chief of Cook Political, Amy Walter added on to Politico‘s Jonathan Martin’s point that the most notable part of this Des Moines Register poll was Kamala Harris’s twenty point gap among women “in a heavily white, Midwestern state.” She noted that Cook Political “also [has] seen Harris up 12 pts (double Biden ‘20 showing) in heavily white [Nebraska]-02.”

If you read between the lines of all the election coverage we published last week, it’s clear I’m not exactly bearish on Kamala’s chances to win, and I have been lining up a column for Monday about that. This earthquake of a poll from Iowa further buttresses my belief that this has been the same election the entire time since the fall of Roe, and we have just been reacting to statistical noise while we kill time waiting for election day.

This poll may just be more statistical noise, but it is by far the most significant statistical noise of the election, and if this is even in the same zip code as the final Iowa results, then there is a decent chance that the Democrats will further reinforce the notion that firewall up north really is blue.

 
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