Okay, What About the Selzer Poll?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s kind of hard to know where to start.

The simplest explanation is that there’s a pollster named Ann Selzer. Her home base and speciality is Iowa but she also does national polling. She has a very good track record. For various reasons, among data nerds she’s taken on a kind of legendary status in recent cycles, not only for accuracy but also in 2016 and 2020 for releasing final polls that picked up in advance the surprises that came on Election Day. In other words, she has a record of outlier last polls that are later vindicated by election results. The almost totemic treatment of this poll can’t not be seen as a bit overblown. But Selzer has a very good record. There’s no getting around that.

Her final poll of Iowa, which is of course now a securely red state, was slated to come out at 7 p.m. this evening. People were eagerly awaiting the results to see whether Trump or Harris might be doing better than you’d expect for Iowa. It’s a given that Trump will win Iowa. The question everyone had is whether Selzer’s poll would say Trump’s margin was bigger or narrower than one might expect.

The poll came out and Harris was beating Trump by 3 percentage points. 47-44. No one considered anything like that a possibility. It’s sent a shockwave through election land.

What does it mean?

That’s pretty hard to say. As noted, I think the Selzer worship is a bit over the top. But she has a very good record. What makes this pretty hard to make sense of is that if Harris is really positioned to win Iowa or even come close that would suggest we’ve pretty dramatically underestimated Harris’s electoral power. Like REALLY underestimated her electoral power. As you know, I’ve long believed there’s a good chance that pollsters are doing just that. But this would be at a more dramatic level.

Even for a pollster with a great record, it’s just one poll. Polls can be off. It’s also the case that Iowa is a state with a lot of white, college-educated voters. Democrats do pretty well with those voters right now. It’s also not that long since it was a swing state. So you can make an argument that maybe it’s a surprise but not a surprise that tells us as much as we might imagine about the swing states — most of which are fairly ethnically and racially diverse, have big metro areas, smaller farm sectors, etc.

Maybe. But that itself is a bit of a stretch.

Probably the best way to interpret this is to see it as a bit bad for Trump in directional terms and not get too hung up on the specific numbers. But even that may not really add up since the actual result is so hard to believe that I’m not sure it makes sense to pick and choose — accepting that it must be good news for Harris in directional terms while dismissing the actual results as just not credible.

One way or another, it’s an ominous sign for Trump. How ominous? How important? I really don’t know. But not good for him.