Harris leads in the one Iowa poll that matters—with major national implications

Ann Selzer’s Iowa Poll for the Des Moines Register came out Saturday, and it’s a political thermonuclear bomb: Kamala Harris : 47 Donald Trump : 44 The previous poll had Trump up 47-43 in September, and leading President Joe Biden 50-32 in June. And this matters far beyond saying “it’s just one poll.” Selzer is one of the nation's most accurate pollsters, doing the vast majority of her work in her home state of Iowa.

Her track record is impeccable: (Actual results in parenthesis) 2022 Senate : R+12 ( R+12 ) 2020 President : R+7 ( R+8 ) 2020 Senate : R+4 ( R+7 ) 2018 Governor : D+2 ( R+3 ) — a rare miss 2016 President : R+7 ( R+9 ) 2014 Senate : R+7 ( R+8 ) 2012 President : D+5 ( D+6 ) I remember that 2016 poll like it was yesterday. At the time, Iowa was still considered a battleground state, with Hillary Clinton’s campaign heavily contesting it. When those results came back, we shrugged them off, as they were significantly out of line with other polling showing a close but steady Clinton lead.



In hindsight, it was the canary in the coal mine. And that’s what this is for Donald Trump now. It’s not just the trendlines.

Trump won Iowa by 8 points in 2020. Even a swing of a few points in a white, rural, midwestern state spells incredible danger for Republican chances across the entire midwest, and even into Nebraska, where independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn is trying to pull off a massive upset to unseat incumbent Republican Deb Fischer in that deep red state. Iowa also has two competitive House races, and if these numbers hold, Democrats could flip both of them on Tuesday.

The internals are downright brutal for Trump and his party. “Independent voters, who had consistently supported Trump in the leadup to this election, now break for Harris. That’s driven by the strength of independent women, who back Harris by a 28-point margin, while independent men support Trump, but by a smaller margin,” the Register reported .

“Similarly, senior voters who are 65 and older favor Harris. But senior women support her by a more than 2-to-1 margin, 63% to 28%, while senior men favor her by just 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%.” Harris is crushing it with white, older, rural women.

And who are the most reliable voters, not just in Iowa but the entire freakin’ country? Yeah, those white, older, rural women. So the polling aggregators? Throw them out. Even Nate Silver admits that the data inputs for them—public polls— are garbage , with “herding” driving risk-averse pollsters into releasing the exact same numbers as their peers.

“ Specifically, the odds are 1 in 9.5 trillion against at least this many polls showing such a close margin,” Silver wrote. Yet somehow he refuses to make the next leap—if the data is quite literally impossible, then how can his model still be of any insight given that it is based on that garbage data? That goes for 538 and all the other aggregators.

Throw them out. This is a different kind of election. As I tweeted on Friday: x I know plenty of polling, including my own, that doesn’t look like the public polling, and won’t be publicly released.

And it just confirms that the aggregators are being fed by shit data, and their results are shit. https://t.co/3awpphCfeC — Markos Moulitsas (@markos) November 2, 2024 This Selzer poll proves my point, and it won’t be the only state in which the final results will be different than what the public polling and the aggregators claim.

I will say this: Harris is looking really good in the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. And holy shit, the ground game is driving hard for that final victory. x Reuters reported earlier this month that Elon Musk's America PAC, during an internal meeting, said it wouldn't hit its goal of 450,000 door knocks by election day in WI.

At this rate, Harris campaign in PA will hit 450,000 door knocks in 225 minutes, just shy of four hours. https://t.co/upkZzrocN1 pic.

twitter.com/imq6ZiAHrj — Matt Ortega (@MattOrtega) November 2, 2024 The sunbelt states are tighter, and Trump has a real chance to win them. We don’t want that.

We want to win everything and then some. Like Iowa. And the Texas and Florida Senate races.

So no, none of this is to say that Harris and Senate and House Democrats have it in the bag. We work hard for every last possible vote, everywhere . But just like in 2016, Selzer has reset the expectations of the race.

Let’s freakin’ finish strong and bring it home. Let's get to work electing Kamala Harris our next president! Sign up for as many shifts as you can between now and Nov. 5 to talk with progressive voters in key states who might not turn out without hearing from you!.