US election analysis: Eye-opening Iowa poll shows shift to Kamala Harris in key swing state

In the most contrary US presidential election in living memory it was inevitable that the traditional “October surprise” did not arrive until November. On Saturday a new poll from Iowa, which has been a steadfast Donald Trump bastion since his breakthrough year in 2016, showed Kamala Harris leading 47 to 44 per cent.
It was the most striking return of a series of polls which bolster the Harris argument, including a Sunday New York Times/Siena poll which show the Democratic candidate now holding a narrow lead in Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.
After months when all big polling companies returned verdicts that showed Trump and Harris intractably and – to some eyes, suspiciously – locked neck and neck in the seven contentious battleground states, the Iowa poll stands out as sharp and bold. More significantly it was conducted by Selzer and Company, a Des Moines pollster firm whose against-the-grain accuracy has earned it a lauded status among national polling firms.
“It is a big gap and I point you additionally to the margin that Kamala Harris wins older women with,” company founder Ann Selzer told the BBC on Saturday evening. “It is a two-to-one margin in women aged 65 and older. Obviously there is something going on here – older women is who you want to appeal to because they are the most reliable voters. And Kamala Harris is doing very well with that group. Independents in Iowa do switch back and forth but in this poll they are solidly behind Kamala Harris.”
In September an Iowa poll had Trump holding a four-point lead over Harris, while a poll taken in June returned an 18-point Trump lead over then candidate Joe Biden. The poll comprised 808 likely voters in Iowa, including some who have cast early votes and a cohort who definitely intend on voting. It allows for a plus or minus margin of error of 3.4 percentage points. It was conducted between October 28th and 31st.
The Selzer poll, established in 1996, was an outlier in correctly anticipating Barack Obama’s win in the Iowa Democratic caucuses and also distinguished itself in correctly showing that Donald Trump had opened a sizeable lead over Hillary Clinton in the closing poll of the 2016 presidential election.
Trump’s entry to presidential politics has proven a graveyard for polling predictions: in the past two elections he has significantly outperformed the polling predictions and a collective fear of being demonstrably inaccurate may be contributing to the slew of polls showing both candidates holding a negligible one point lead either way in the most contentious states. With the margins of error built into the equation, whatever about being right, the big polling companies avoid being shown up as wrong.
But Saturday’s eye-opening Iowa poll led veteran pollster Nate Silver to point out that Selzer “has a long history of bucking the conventional wisdom and being right. In a world where most pollsters have a lot of egg on their faces, she has near-oracular status.”
But Selzer’s poll stands in flat contradiction to another poll issued by Emerson College which still has the Republican candidate comfortably in control with a nine-point lead in Iowa, where he swept to the party nomination in January, winning 98 out of 99 states. The Selzer poll also shows that RFK junior still commands a 3 per cent support base despite ending his bid as an Independent and formally joining the Trump campaign in late summer.
The poll will concern the Trump campaign as the election enters its closing 48 hours. The former president has brought his message to states where a Republican victory is unlikely in recent weeks, including New York and Virginia. If the Iowa poll does accurately presage a decisive late shift in sentiment towards Harris, future analyses may find that Trump made the same mistake as Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 by neglecting key constituent states.
On Sunday the latest New York Times/Siena Poll delivered a message consistent with the abiding theme of the election: that nationally the candidates remain locked in a race that appears indivisible. If there is one bright chink for the Trump campaign it is that their candidate is now tied at 48 with Harris in Pennsylvania, where both candidates will campaign on Monday.
“This election could be a reboot; that is sort of what the NYT Seina Poll is showing: that Harris has rebooted the Obama coalition and is getting younger voters and voters of colour to turn out in greater numbers,” said pollster and political analyst Kristen Soltis Anderson on Sunday.
“But it could also be a realignment, and that is what the Trump team is hoping for: that they are actually doing better with younger voters and voters of colour than expected. So even if they are losing seniors – especially senior women – a little bit they are making up ground in other places. And just because the polls are generally showing this race close the uncertainty is not just we are not sure who is going to win. It is also possible that one of these candidates could run away with this.”