The famed Iowa pollster who turned heads this weekend when she projected Kamala Harris would pull off a shock win in the Hawkeye State—an estimation that turned out to be dead wrong on Election Day—has addressed the major flop.
J. Ann Selzer, 68, told the The Des Moines Register late Tuesday night that she was going back to the drawing board to see where it all went wrong.
“The poll findings we produced for The Des Moines Register and Mediacom did not match what the Iowa electorate ultimately decided in the voting booth today,” she said. “I’ll be reviewing data from multiple sources with hopes of learning why that happened. And, I welcome what that process might teach me.”
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Selzer’s poll, released last Saturday, grabbed headlines and raised eyebrows across the political world when it placed Harris 4 points ahead of Trump in Iowa, which he easily carried in both 2016 and 2020.
The poll suggested Harris may be on her way to a landslide victory and that national pollsters had underestimated just how much voters cared about abortion rights. The poll, bearing Selzer’s name, was immediately legitimized by her past successes in the Trump era and her reputation as the gold-standard pollster in Iowa since 2008.
In reality, however, it was the national pollsters who nailed their predictions on how Iowa would vote. Trump, despite not holding a single campaign rally there, won the state comfortably with 56 percent of the vote—more than 12 points higher than the 47-to-44 percent Harris win that Selzer had projected.
Selzer further explained her poll’s shortcomings as such: “Technically, the poll had some ‘give’ in that neither candidate reached 50 percent. So, the people who said they had voted/would vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could easily have switched to Donald Trump. The late deciders could have opted for Trump in the final days of the campaign after interviewing was complete. The people who had already voted but opted not to tell our interviewers for whom they voted could have given Trump an edge.”
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