‘Queen of polling’ J Ann Selzer quits after Iowa survey missed by 16 points

J Ann Selzer, the celebrated Iowa election pollster, announced on Sunday that she is moving on “to other ventures and opportunities”, two weeks after her survey in the state wrongly predicted a strong shift to Kamala Harris in the days before the election.

That poll, which projected a 47% to 44% lead for the vice-president over Donald Trump on the back of older women breaking for Democrats over the issue of reproductive rights, came three days before the national vote, giving Democrats false hope that Harris could win the White House decisively. When the votes were counted, Selzer was off by 16 points as the former president won the state decisively.

Selzer, known as the “queen of polling”, shot to fame in 2008 when she predicted that a virtually unknown senator, Barack Obama, would beat frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses.

She told MSNBC before the vote that Harris was leading in early voting in Iowa “because of her strength with women generally, even stronger with women aged 65 and older. Her margin is more than 2-to-1 – and this is an age group that shows up to vote, or votes early, in disproportionately large numbers.”

Trump disputed the poll in a post on his Truth Social network at the time.

“In fact, it’s not even close! All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT.”

According to unofficial results, Trump ultimately won Iowa by 13 points, 56% to 43%.

In a column published by the Des Moines Register on Sunday, Selzer wrote that public opinion polling had been her “life’s work” and had made a decision to step back from it a year ago.

“Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course,” she wrote. “It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite.”

Seltzer ventured that her strong track record had “maybe that history of accuracy made the outlier position too comfortable”.

“Polling is a science of estimation, and science has a way of periodically humbling the scientist. So, I’m humbled, yet always willing to learn from unexpected findings,” she added.

A review of Selzer’s final 2024 poll hasn’t revealed a clear reason for missing Trump’s runaway victory in the state, the paper said in a column published on Sunday, adding that it is “evaluating the best ways to continue surveys that will provide accurate information and insight about issues that matter to Iowans”.

Editor Carol Hunter wrote that the Iowa Poll “has been an important legacy indicator and we recognize the need to evolve and find new ways to accurately take the pulse of Iowans on state and national issues”.

But the black eye the polling business has received for failing to predict a strong Trump victory in the electoral college, 312 to 226, and popular vote, taking with him all seven swing states and seeing every state moving Republican, may not be entirely deserved.

Most political polls for the 2024 presidential election saw a close race in the electoral college, and a popular-vote victory for Harris. But the election results so far show that Trump added more than 2m votes to his 2020 total, while Harris received millions fewer votes than Joe Biden did four years earlier, in what some are calling the lost “couch vote”.

Trump won the electoral college 312 to 226, and currently leads the popular vote by 1.7%. UC Riverside polling expert Andy Crosby wrote that Trump’s margin of victory was within the 2.2% margin of error of most of the final elections polls.

After what turned out to be the final Selzer Iowa poll this year, she had offered these words of warning to excited Never Trump podcasters at The Bulwark: “People looked at my methodology ... and it’s published in every article in the Des Moines Register, how we do it, but you look at it on paper and you go, It’s too simple, this can’t possibly work. And so far it has, but I’m prepared that one day it will not work and I will blow up into tiny little pieces and be scattered across the city of Des Moines.”