Making Sense of the Surprising Poll Showing Harris Ahead in Iowa
The finding of a tight race, by a top-rated pollster, surprised both parties in a state that hasn’t been on anyone’s radar in the presidential election
Democrats got a gift over the weekend, albeit one that could prove to be a mirage. The Iowa Poll, the gold standard of political surveys in the Hawkeye State, showed Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of former President Donald Trump by 3 percentage points.
It was a shocking finding for a state nobody considered competitive and raised Democratic hopes of a last-minute shift that might benefit Harris in traditional battleground states such as Michigan and Wisconsin. Overall, the final polls taken just before Election Day found a neck-and-neck race in the battlegrounds. But Democrats are hoping that the apparent shift toward Harris recorded by the Iowa Poll, particularly among older women and independents, indicated a broader trend, possibly in reaction to Trump’s recent rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, where some warm-up speakers made racist, sexist or otherwise demeaning comments.
Republicans immediately threw cold water on the poll, casting it as an outlier. The former president won Iowa by 8 percentage points in 2020, and there has been no general election presidential campaigning in the state or significant advertising. Iowa’s entire congressional delegation is Republican, and it has been trending red for years. And in other polls released over the weekend, there was limited evidence of a drastically reordered race.
In early 2023, the Democratic National Committee yanked Iowa’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses and instead made South Carolina, a state that saved President Biden’s 2020 primary campaign, the party’s leadoff nominating state. That led even some Democrats to suggest that the party had essentially given up on competing for rural voters.
Republicans kept their first nominating contest in Iowa, where Trump in January won more than half the vote in what was the largest margin in the history of the first GOP presidential nominating contest.
Iowa GOP Chairman Jeff Kaufmann said on X that the poll’s main sponsor, the Des Moines Register newspaper, and its pollster, Ann Selzer, had “lost any shred of credibility they had left.” He added that the poll should be considered “propaganda” and that Trump would win the state.
Trump’s campaign, in a memo Sunday, dubbed it “an absurd outlier poll.”
Selzer said in an email that her “method for the current poll is the same as I used for the 2020 and 2016 Iowa Polls that showed Donald Trump winning Iowa.”
Even Democrats suggested the findings should be treated with caution, though state party officials tried to leverage it to motivate activists in the state for a final wave of door-knocking and calls.
“This is just a poll, and what really matters is that Iowans show up and make their voices heard,” Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart told reporters.
Iowa House Democratic Leader Jennifer Konfrst told reporters she was “pleasantly surprised, but not shocked” by the poll’s findings. She called Iowa a “purple” state and said abortion restrictions are motivating women in particular. “They are sick and tired of politicians interfering in their doctors’ offices,” she said. The state bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
The Iowa Poll found swings toward Harris among some voter groups that were larger than commonly seen in surveys. After trailing among independent likely voters in prior surveys, those voters favored Harris by 7 points in the new poll. The change was driven by independent women, who backed Harris in the new survey by 28 points, compared with a 5-point tilt toward Harris in September.
Another pollster, Emerson College Polling, on Saturday reported Trump ahead in Iowa by 10 points. It found Harris ahead among women by 5 points, whereas she led by 20 points among women in the Iowa Poll.
A New York Times/Siena College poll of battleground states released Sunday, which didn’t include Iowa, offered mixed evidence. The survey reported that Harris leads by 11 points, 55% to 44%, among the 8% of voters who only recently settled on a choice of candidate. The survey also showed she had made gains in North Carolina, where her 2-point lead contrasted with the survey’s finding in late September of a 3-point Trump advantage; and in Georgia, where Harris had trailed by 4 points in late September and now led by 1 point. Trump’s pathways to 270 Electoral College votes are greatly diminished without those two states, and the former president has several North Carolina stops in the closing stretch.
But the same survey also found that the race in Pennsylvania—which is particularly critical to Harris’s chances—had settled into a tie after Harris led by 4 points in September. And it showed no movement in Wisconsin, which like Iowa has an overwhelmingly white voter pool. The survey found Harris leading there by 2 points, unchanged from its prior poll.
Overall, the Times/Siena poll found the race within the polls’ margin of error in all seven battleground states.
A separate survey released Sunday, by NBC News, found the two candidates tied at 49% each in a head-to-head matchup among voters nationally, with essentially no movement from a month earlier. In October, the survey found the candidates tied at 48% each.