Kamala Harris has scored a sensational last-minute polling update over Donald Trump in Iowa, which is not a battleground state, just three days before Tuesday’s historic presidential election.
The Democratic nominee has jumped ahead of her erratic Republican rival with voters—despite earlier signs her campaign in the all-important Hawkeye State had fizzled, and that Trump was a shoo-in.
A nationally respected poll by The Des Moines Register/Mediacom has the vice president currently leading former President Trump by 47% to 44%.
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It follows a previous Iowa poll in September that gave Trump an impressive 4-point lead over Harris. Incredibly, a poll in June gave him an 18-point lead over then rival Joe Biden.
“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” the Register quotes pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”
Meanwhile, whale decapitator Robert F. Kennedy Jr. —who shuttered his independent presidential campaign to support previous rival Trump but remains on the Iowa ballot—scored 3% of the vote, down from 6% in September and 9% in June. The latest poll was carried out among 808 likely Iowa voters—including those who said they had already voted and and those who confirmed they would definitely be casting a vote. It was conducted by Selzer & Co. from Oct. 28-31. The margin of error is reportedly plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
Less than 1% of those polled said they would vote for Libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver.
A victory for Harris in Iowa would be huge turnaround as the state backed Trump in 2016 by a nine point margin and eight in 2020.
It has also seen little investment by either side in advertising or turnout while they focus their firepower on what are seen as the swing states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and the biggest of them all, Pennsylvania.
