Ann Selzer predicts a shock win for Kamala Harris in Iowa – here’s why it’s a big deal

The heavyweight credentials of ‘Iowa’s polling queen’ mean she must be taken seriously as election day looms

A bombshell poll for the Des Moines Register in Iowa now shows Kamala Harris taking a three-point lead in the state, which Donald Trump won in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
What makes it hard to dismiss is that it comes from pollster Ann Selzer who has made a career out of defying conventional wisdom – and coming out on top.
Ms Selzer has collected accolades throughout her decades conducting the Register’s polls, with admirers labelling her “Iowa’s polling queen,” “the polling Cassandra of Des Moines”, and “the best pollster in politics”.
For her part, the 68-year-old has not got carried away with the hype.
She is a self-described old-school pollster who keeps her feet on the ground, following the data and nothing else. There is no “secret sauce” beyond that, she insists.
The approach took her to national acclaim when she accurately predicted that a first-senator by the name of Barack Obama would beat frontrunner Hillary Clinton, the former first lady, in the Iowa caucuses in 2008.
Her forecast sparked reactions ranging from scepticism to outright mockery when it was published.  A member of the Clinton campaign even called up to complain.
“[PBS anchor] Judy Woodruff was interviewing me that day and said, ‘How did you assume this? Why did you assume this?’” Ms Selzer recalled to Politico.
“I go, ‘I assumed nothing.’ My data told me this was what was going to happen.”
Ms Selzer’s latest poll has sent a shockwave through a race notably devoid of surprises. Nate Silver, a fellow pollster, recently complained that his peers were hedging their bets by forecasting a close race – the Register’s prediction has burst through that consensus.
If once the forecast might have been greeted with disbelief, Ms Selzer’s heavyweight credentials mean that it has to be taken seriously.
One of her strengths is thought to be that she is based in Iowa, rather than Washington, DC or New York like other big-name pollsters, and knows how to reach regular Americans.
While a long-time resident of the Hawkeye State, Ms Selzer was born a few states along, in Kansas.
Even if she might have seemed destined for life as a pollster – conducting a survey of “neighbourhood moms” at the age of five, according to the Wall Street Journal – she undertook a pre-medical course at the University of Kansas before finding her heart lay in data.
She took up a communications theory and research program at the University of Iowa, followed by an academic fellowship in Britain and a stint on Capitol Hill, then returned to the state permanently.
While at the Des Moines Register in 1987, Ms Selzer dug through the newspaper’s polling data and questioned its conclusion that George H. W. Bush would beat Bob Dole in the Republican caucuses.
“I believe the Register is publishing that George Bush will win the caucus, and I don’t think that’s true,” she told her editor. The Register changed its prediction to Dole – correctly – while Bush came in third.
Ms Selzer, who still conducts the Register’s polls after leaving the newspaper in 1994 to set up a private firm, samples voters from the lists of registered voters and does not weight her results by past voting habits.
Most importantly, she keeps her prejudices out of the equation and does not care who wins or loses – as long as she is right.
“I like to say, “Keep your dirty hands off your data,’” she told FiveThirtyEight.
“That’s making assumptions of what is or isn’t going to happen and then deciding you’re going to weigh down the minority vote because you don’t think they’re going to show up.”
The approach has proved a winning one, and elevated her to one of the most respected and accurate pollsters in America.
Four years before Mr Obama’s victory in 2008 – a forecast she says made her career – Ms Selzer was the only pollster to accurately predict the order of the Democratic candidates in 2004.
In 2014, she predicted Joni Ernst’s breakaway victory in an Iowa senate race over Bruce Braley to within a percentage point.
Two years later, she saw Bernie Sanders closing the gap on Ms Clinton when she made her second run at the presidency.
And in 2020, when other pollsters predicted a neck-and-neck race between Trump and Joe Biden in Iowa, she forecasted that the Republican would win by seven points.
In the end, he won by eight. The poll was one of the early signs that the presidential race, where Mr Biden appeared to be easily outstripping his rival, would come down to the wire.
However, even Iowa’s “polling queen” is not right all of the time. She predicted that John Kerry would beat George W. Bush in the state in 2004, only for Mr Bush to go on to win by 0.67 per cent.
Her latest poll will alarm the Trump campaign.
Even Ms Harris’s campaign will have been caught off guard, with both candidates focusing their efforts on the battleground states in the final days of the campaign. Trump has recently made appearances in “blue states” like New Mexico, which may seem hopelessly optimistic if the Register’s forecast is accurate.
For Trump, the Iowa poll may prove the deathknell to his hopes of retaking the White House. For Ms Selzer, it would just be one more example of received wisdom she has proved wrong.