With just a few days before the final votes are cast in the 2024 presidential election, a closely watched poll with a track record of accuracy showed a shocking reversal in a Midwestern state.
The latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll conducted by Selzer & Co. showed Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters.
That’s flipped from September, when the poll showed Trump with a 4-point lead over Harris. In June, the poll had Trump leading Joe Biden, who was still in the race at the time, by 18 points.
“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., told the Register. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”
Selzer attributed Harris’s sudden lead to voters over 65 years old as well as independent voters, especially women, shifting toward the vice president.
Iowa was not considered a swing state in 2024 as it has trended more Republican after voting for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008.
But political observers noted that Iowa now has an abortion law that bans the procedure after about six weeks into pregnancy, with limited exceptions. And Harris has made abortion rights a key message of her campaign.
Prediction markets have also tilted more toward Harris in recent days, with a top data scientist saying that Trump has lost his once-formidable lead.
Meanwhile, Selzer’s Iowa Poll is considered a gold-standard survey and could have implications in other Midwestern states that will help decide the election.
For example, her final poll in 2020 indicated that Trump and other Republicans maintained big leads in the state, despite other surveys that pointed to a tight race. In fact, other polls were so promising for Biden that he even made a campaign stop there.
But Trump won Iowa by 8 percentage points, and Selzer’s numbers also served as a warning that other states in the region wouldn’t back Biden as much as the consensus had suggested. Four years ago, the critical “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania went for Biden by razor-thin margins.
Those states are dead heats again with Trump leading in some recent data, but the stunning numbers out of Iowa could point to more Midwest support for Harris than was previously thought.
Still, the Iowa survey was met with some skepticism, with polling guru Nate Silver saying Selzer will “probably” be wrong. That’s even has he acknowledged that she is among his two highest-rated pollsters.
“In a world where most pollsters have a lot of egg on their faces, she has near-oracular status,” Silver wrote late Saturday.
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