Over a month after the 2024 election, Ann Selzer, one of the nation’s most respected pollsters, is still searching for answers to a significant miss in her final Iowa Poll.
The poll, published by the Des Moines Register and Mediacom just days before the election, showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading by 4 points in Iowa. Yet, Donald Trump secured the state with a commanding 13-point victory. The discrepancy has left Selzer questioning the accuracy of her otherwise trusted methodology.
“We don’t know,” Selzer admitted during an interview for Iowa Press at Iowa PBS Studios. “Do I wish I knew? Yes, I wish I knew.”
A storied career and an unexplained miss
For decades, Selzer and Co. earned accolades for its ability to predict outcomes that diverged from other polls but ultimately proved correct, such as Joni Ernst’s decisive 2014 Senate win. However, this time, Selzer’s usual methods, which focus on demographics rather than turnout predictions, missed the mark.
“If you’re hoping that I had landed on exactly why things went wrong, I have not,” Selzer said. “It does sort of awaken me in the middle of the night, and I think, ‘Well, maybe I should check this. This is something that would be very odd if it were to happen.’ But we’ve explored everything.”
Post-election analysis revealed that if her poll had been adjusted to reflect turnout from the 2020 election, it would have shown Trump with a 6-point lead—closer to reality, but still a notable miss. Despite this, Selzer defended her approach.
“How do I know before the election what the future electorate looks like?” she asked. “We can’t really go back and look at what the turnout was before, because that might not be the turnout again.”
Facing accusations of election interference
In the wake of the polling miss, Selzer also faced harsh accusations of criminal manipulation. Some critics suggested that she had intentionally skewed the poll results to benefit Kamala Harris’s campaign, an allegation she vehemently denied.
“In such a public poll, and the allegations I take very seriously, they’re saying that this was election interference, which is a crime,” Selzer said. “So the idea that I intentionally set up to deliver this response when I’ve never done that before, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to do it. It’s not my ethic. But to suggest without a single shred of evidence that I was in cahoots with somebody, I was being paid by somebody… It’s all just kind of… it’s hard to pay too much attention to it, except that they’re accusing me of a crime.”
Despite the controversy, Selzer remained resolute in her commitment to ethical polling and continued to question what went wrong with her methodology.
The end of an era
Selzer announced plans to step away from political polling, a decision made prior to the election. Yet, even with the miss, she stands by her methods and says she would not alter her approach if she were to conduct another poll.
“That’s a question that makes me nervous because there are a lot of polling organizations that redesign their polling methodology after they’ve had a miss,” Selzer said. “So I don’t even know what I would do differently if we were going to do one more poll.”
Selzer’s reflections and analysis of the 2024 Iowa Poll underscore the challenges facing pollsters in an increasingly unpredictable political climate. Her full interview can be viewed on Iowa Press via Iowa PBS or online.