Revered Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer on Monday responded to the attacks Donald Trump made against her after her bombshell poll showed him trailing in the state.
The Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll conducted by Selzer and published Saturday showed Kamala Harris leading Trump by three points—47 percent to 44 percent—in Iowa, a state he won comfortably in 2016 and 2020. Although the result differed from that of other Iowa polls, the figures were potentially concerning for Trump given Selzer’s track record of accurately forecasting results in the Hawkeye State.
Trump was sufficiently concerned by the poll to post about it on Truth Social, claiming that all polls “except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater” showed him in the lead. “I’m 10 points up in Iowa,” he said during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania on Sunday. “One of my enemies just puts out a poll—I’m three down.”
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“They just announced a fake poll,” he went on. “Hey, think of it—right before the election—that I’m three points down. I’m not down in Iowa.” Trump’s campaign separately released a memo calling Selzer’s poll “a clear outlier” and pointed to Emerson College polling released the same day that gave Trump a 10-point lead over Harris.
During an appearance Monday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Selzer acknowledged that the result of her poll was a “shock.”
“I’ve been shocked since Tuesday morning last week,” Selzer said. “So I’ve had the time for this to sink in because no one, including me, would’ve thought that Iowa could go for Kamala Harris.”
Co-host Willie Geist specifically asked Selzer about Trump’s criticisms, inviting her to respond to the claim that her poll is just an outlier.
“I give credit to my method for my track record,” Selzer said. “I call my method ‘polling forward.’ So I want to be in a place where my data can show me what’s likely to happen with the future electorate. So I just try to get out of the way of my data saying this is what’s going to happen.”
“A lot of other polls, and I’ll count Emerson among them, are including in the way that they manipulate the data after it comes in, things that have happened in the past,” she continued. “So they’re taking into account exit polls, they’re taking into account what turnout was in past elections. I don’t make any assumptions like that. So it’s in my way of thinking, it’s a cleaner way to forecast a future electorate, which nobody knows what that’s going to be. But we do know that our electorates change in terms of how many people are showing up and what the composition is.”
Selzer later added that the method she used to get these results hadn’t changed from that which she’d used in previous presidential elections that had shown Trump leading in Iowa.
“This method is the same method that we used in 2016 to show Trump winning and 2020 to show Trump winning,” she said. “So he doesn’t like it now—it’s not the poll, it’s what the poll is saying.”
