Ann Selzer’s Shocking Iowa Poll Shakes Up Race

Ann Selzer, you marvelous pollster, with a final poll that is more poaster than pollster. You’ve brought me out of retirement. The last time I was writing about a poll you had done, it was 2020, the global panini was in full swing, and I bore an uncanny resemblance to the brother from Halloweentown. I am now a college graduate, looking like a proper exhausted engineer, and am a full-time resident of the State of Iowa.

To be fair, this poll result was not even in my wildest dreams. I had been bracing myself for a Trump +13 result, similar to the 2022 Senate results in Iowa. One that was respectable, and in line with the ongoing trends that I had thought had been continuing in Iowa. Then 6pm, 11/2/2024 hit, a date and time which shall live in infamy. My beloved, undefeated #11 ISU Cyclones losing at home to Texas Tech (Damn you Patrick Mahomes), then this absolute bombshell of a poll drops.

Harris +3

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it. There was no way it could be true. Looking back at all the final Selzer polls, you have to go back to 2008, when Ann came back with 54-37 Obama in her last poll before E-Day, also administered October 28-31. Dear readers, the final result of that election was 54-44, nailing Obama’s number, even though the topline was off by ~7 points.

ISU then loses to Texas Tech, and by that point, I don’t care. We have a poll from the Gold Standard. A Gold Standard which has stuck her neck on the line more than once, and has yet to be wrong. A Gold Standard which has only been spiked once, and that was due to a leak. And here we are, a poll administered after 1939 called wanting its America First MSG Rally punchline back, with the freshest data in Iowa before I spend time helping people go out and have their voices heard at the ballot box, saying Harris is winning, not just the nation, but Iowa.

So, dear reader, you may be asking, why? Well, apart from Kim Reynolds and the Iowa GOP having become a sort of pariah in terms of governance (see six-week abortion ban, the DEI/anti-woke University mandates, mandated changes to how elections are run, battles with the State Auditor, spending political capital on supporting Ron “Sonnenrad” DeSantis, and corruptly forcing ISU Students to have to use Workday to register and pay for classes), there may have been a shift that we were missing. As seen in the poll, college graduates are one of the primary reasons for this big shift. Using the Edison exit poll data from 2020, college grads were Biden +4. In the Selzer poll, they are Harris +30. This alone helps to dictate that if this poll is even remotely right, where the swings will be coming from.

The college factor

Looking at the trend map from 2020, and factoring in Kraz’s math from college student precincts in 2020, there are quite a few counties which will be indicators of this potential swing.

• Polk, which contains Des Moines and most of its suburbs; Dallas, which contains Waukee and other fast-growing Des Moines suburbs/exurbs
• Story, home of Ames and my dear alma mater, the 2020 Fiesta Bowl Champion, 2023 Big XII Women’s and 2024 Big XII Men’s Basketball Tournament Champions, the Iowa State Cyclones
• Black Hawk, containing Cedar Falls, Waterloo, and the University of Northern Iowa
• Linn, my new home county, home of Cedar Rapids and a bulk of the Avionics and Mission Systems engineering for Collins Aerospace; Johnson, home of Iowa City and that school with a very good medical system and not so good football team, also where Caitlin Clark played
• Woodbury, home of Iowa House Rep and occasional baseball pitcher J. D. Scholten
• Sioux City; Pottawattamie, home of the first rona case in the State of Iowa, Council Bluffs, and other various Omaha suburbs
• Poweshiek, home of Grinnell College.
  
  

Apart from Poweshiek, most of these counties had decent sized trends towards Biden in 2020. Comparing results to the 2022 Senate race, this crew continued their trend or stayed fairly steady. Yes, there are colleges in Dubuque, Decorah, and the Quad Cities, however, by most indications, these won’t be the areas where a big, education-based swing would occur. When using the Election Shuffler, a uniform swing in Iowa to get Harris +3 looks like this:

Now, I highly doubt that this is the map come 11/5/24 at 11pm CST, but it comes close. I am not confident enough in my own modeling to get margins in counties right, however, I can at least guess who the winners would be. A Harris +3 Iowa is more likely to look like this:

“Safe” means a margin of 10+%, “Likely” is a margin of 5-10%, “Lean” is 1-5%, and “Tilt” is a margin of less than 1%. The college-ed swing still makes a difference along the Mississippi, and even in the uber-Dutch, Feenstra-loving, blessed counties in the NW that voted out what had been the wackiest member of Congress until MTG et. al. joined in 2021, where the margins would be more like Waukesha than Winston.

Other states

Now, what does this mean in say, Nebraska, where Dan Osborn has had some favourable polling in his Quixotic campaign against Deb Fischer, or even in Kansas, where their gold standard had Trump +5? I’d think that it shows some truth to the polling, however, as with all polling, especially the herding seen this cycle, I’d take it with a grain of salt. It is quite possible, or indeed, most likely that there is a trend being caught. However, whether due to uncertainty, war flashbacks, stupidity, or outright malpractice, the trend is being taken and run way too far (see ABC’s 2020 pièce de résistance, Biden +17 in Wisconsin), and as a result, the poll becomes useless.

On the flip side, this may be like the MRP Polls YouGov had done in the UK in 2017; the unpublished Survation poll in the UK in 2015; the Exit Polls in 1992, 2015, 2017, and 2024; and of course, Queen Ann’s own 2020 and 2022 masterpieces, wherein instead of trying to follow the conventional wisdom and/or existing herding, took the data they found, and stuck to it, and in some cases, didn’t capture how far the trend against the conventional wisdom went. The exit polls in 1992 and 2015 famously saw Tory leads, but missed the majorities; 2017 saw the hung parliament; and 2024 saw just how fractured the political landscape in the UK truly was. Survation and YouGov just about nailed it in 2015 and 2017, respectively, along with Ann Selzer’s truth bombs showing that yes, Iowa has shocked the nation.

Conclusion

So, what is the end result? Well, factoring in a standard worst-case MOE, the result is ~Trump +5, which still puts the election safely in the hands of our first female president-elect. Like I said earlier, something majorly wrong had to have occurred. Even when Selzer has been off, she’s been within 1% of one of the candidate’s final percentage numbers, with most of the difference having been the undecideds massively going one way. When factoring in this, the result is still Trump +3.

Factoring all of this together, it’s just as confusing as saying what exactly causes lift, even down to the two distinct possibilities. In this case, either Harris has ~47% vote in Iowa, or Selzer’s perfect record comes to an end. If it is door #1, expect photos of me in Hawkeye Gear. If door #2, 2020 and 2022’s waiting game comes back.