(Fox News) Pollster J. Ann Selzer suggested her pre-election Iowa poll showing Vice President Kamala Harris in the lead had “energize[d] and activate[d] Republican voters” to prove it wrong in her post-mortem Thursday.
Her Des Moines Register/Mediacom shock poll showed a 7-point shift from President-elect Donald Trump to Harris from September, when he had a 4-point lead over the vice president (47% to 43%), to Saturday when she was up 3 (47% to 44%), in a state Trump had carried easily in 2016 and 2020 and hadn’t been considered a swing state in 2024.
Much of the media took her words as gospel, as pundits on MSNBC, CNN and ABC’s “The View” all celebrated the forecast, hoping it was a positive sign for Harris on Election Day. After the results came in, Trump supporters and conservatives quickly slammed and mocked Selzer’s poll.
Selzer wrote in an op-ed for the Des Moines Register that she had been getting bombarded with criticism and questions. In response, she suggested her poll itself may have shifted the state for Trump.
A farmer shows support for Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump and a view on abortion on August 10, 2024, near Hawkeye, Iowa. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
“My inbox and my voice mail have been full of questions the last few days — those who wanted to know why I ‘manipulated’ the data to show a false Harris lead, and those who wondered if the data were too good to be true,” Selzer wrote.
She continued, “In response to a critique that I ‘manipulated’ the data, or had been paid (by some anonymous source, presumably on the Democratic side), or that I was exercising psyops or some sort of voter suppression: I told more than one news outlet that the findings from this last poll could actually energize and activate Republican voters who thought they would likely coast to victory. Maybe that’s what happened.”
Selzer added that her team is working to review what happened and “raise any plausible question” about the data. She also admitted she “had a sense of the late shift” after listening to voters in the days leading up to the election.
