Famed Iowa pollster Ann Selzer spent decades building her credibility, but as the saying goes, she lost it all in a moment.
For those who are lucky enough not to know — because not knowing means your life is not consumed by politics — Selzer has been hailed for years as a gold-standard pollster. Not only among Iowa pollsters, but among all pollsters. Her Des Moines Register poll is treated as something sacred. So…
You can only imagine (and even if you watched in real time, it is still hard to imagine it happened) the reaction among Democrats and the Selzer-worshipping corporate media when her poll said Donald Trump would lose Iowa to Kamala Never-Worked-At-McDonald’s Harris by three points.
Selzer surveyed 808 likely Iowa voters between October 28-31 and discovered Kamala was up 47 to 44 percent over Trump.
Trump, to the surprise of no one with half a brain, ended up winning Iowa by 13 points, 56 to 43 percent.
Her poll was off by 16 points! The margin of error was 3.4 points, which adds up to 6.8 points worse case, and it ended up being 16 points off.
Selzer nearly tied the record for the worst poll in my memory, which was the Washington Post’s 2020 poll of Wisconsin that said Joe Biden would take the state by 17 points. It ended with 16.3 fewer points than 17.
Trump won Iowa by 8.2 points in 2020 and 9.5 in 2016. But now, according to this poll, The Donald was facing a humiliating upset loss in a state neither candidate campaigned or advertised in.
Let’s back up just a bit for some context. We were buried in polls this year. Buried in them. There was good polling and bad polling, but nowhere did I see a poll out of any reliably red state (like Iowa) that said Trump was facing an upset. Additionally, in 2024, Trump polled better than he ever had, narrowly led in five to seven of all seven swing states, and the Harris campaign never once went to Iowa.
And she still released this poll.
Why?
It is not at all unusual for a pollster to get a counterintuitive result and then go back and re-check their work. Redo another 200 surveys or something.
But despite all that, go read the oh-so-authoritative write-up of the poll. Zero humility. It reads best if you hear it in the voice of Inspector Clouseau.
What the organized left, including the corporate media, did with this poll was really something. It immediately became another manufactured October Surprise, along with the Puerto Rico joke and the Trump Wants Liz Cheney Executed Hoax. This was it, ya’ll. Despite hundreds of polls saying one thing, from Mt. Selzer, the hand of God delivered the truth inscribed on a stone tablet that we have at long last defeated Orange Bad Man.
I was never angry or worried about the poll because I knew — like the ginned-up outrage over the Puerto Rico joke and the Liz Cheney Hoax — it was one more obvious and desperate late-launching piece of bullshit. And to be honest, seeing all the hope that poll gave to terrible people eventually dashed was awesome.
But now we come to my all-time favorite part…
Rather than own her failed poll, Selzer is now suggesting her poll was correct on the day it was released, but it is such an important and influential poll, it helped Trump.
“I told more than one news outlet that the findings from this last poll could actually energize and activate Republican voters who thought they would likely coast to victory,” she explained in the Des Moines Register Thursday. “Maybe that’s what happened.”
And that right there tells you why she blew her credibility in one fell swoop: arrogance.
For 20 years, I’ve been taking positions online, and I’m wrong all the time. Being wrong doesn’t kill your credibility. What kills it is not admitting you were wrong. We’re all fallible. But Selzer blew a poll by 16 points, tossed it like a hand grenade into the last few days of a close and consequential election, and now she’s all, My Mighty Reputation and Poll Changed the World!
God bless Donald Trump for forcing these people to reveal who they really are.
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.