New Iowa Polling Points to Harris Landslide

Is it a fluke??

11/03/2024 PMSwithESP 2024 Election 0

Kamala Harris has taken a 3-point lead over Donald Trump in the red state of Iowa, according to a new high-quality poll released Saturday from Selzer & Co, a polling company rated one of the best by FiveThirtyEight.

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” pollster J. Ann Selzer told The Des Moines Register. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”

The poll shows that women, older and independent, are behind the shift that has Harris leading Trump 47% to 44%. The poll of 808 likely voters was held from October 28-31. Notably, neither campaign has visited Iowa since the presidential primaries.

  • Independent likely voters, who have supported Trump in every other Iowa Poll this year, now favor Harris, 46% to 39%.  
  • Now, independent women choose Harris over Trump 57% to 29%. That’s up from September, when independent women gave her just a 5-point lead, 40% to 35%.  
  • Independent men still favor Trump 47% to 37%.

Overall, Harris enjoys a 20 point lead with women, 56%-36%, while Trump’s lead with men has shrunk to 14 points from 27 points in September.

From the Des Moines Register, and The Hill

If Selzer’s impressive record of accurate polling were to apply this shift across other states, Harris would win the election in a landslide, with 416 electoral-college votes.

For some poll-watchers the survey has taken on a near-mythical ability to forecast the election across the country. If that were the case, the results published on Saturday would be very good news for Ms Harris.

In the past five presidential elections, Selzer & Co have successfully predicted the winner with their final poll four out of five times, with an absolute error of 3.1% in Iowa, but an even better accuracy in other states. Selzer’s absolute error is lower in North Dakota, South Dakota, Michigan and Wisconsin, and outperforms 14 states’ own polling averages from 2004 to 2020. 

In the two previous Trump cycles from 2016-2020, polls in Michigan and Wisconsin underestimated Trump whereas the Selzer Poll did not.

From The Economist, rated by MediaBiasFactcheck as Least Biased based on balanced reporting and High for factual reporting due to a clean fact-check record.

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