Ann Selzer still searching for answers after final Iowa Poll badly missed its mark

JOHNSTON — More than a month after the November election, Iowa-based pollster Ann Selzer still is searching for answers.

Selzer’s Iowa Poll, published by the Des Moines Register and Mediacom, had developed a reputation as one of the best polling firms in the country. But that distinction took a massive hit in the 2024 presidential election in Iowa, when the final Iowa Poll, published just days before the election, showed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris ahead in the state by 4 percentage points.

Three days after the poll was published, Republican Donald Trump won the state by 13 percentage points.

Shortly after the election, Selzer announced her company, Selzer and Co., no longer will conduct political polling — a plan she says was in place long before the election and was not influenced by the poor showing by the final Iowa Poll.

In the meantime, Selzer has reanalyzed the poll’s data and searched for answers. She said she still sometimes awakes at 4 a.m. with a new question.

And the answer is always the same.

“We don’t know,” Selzer said Friday during the taping of “Iowa Press” at Iowa PBS Studios in Johnston. “Do I wish I knew? Yes, I wish I knew.”

Selzer, whose polling career spans four decades, said she has not been able to identify precisely why the final Iowa Poll was so far off on the presidential race in Iowa.

“If you’re hoping that I had landed on exactly why things went wrong, I have not,” she 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.”

The Iowa Poll stood out in the past when it strayed from other polling at the time but turned out to be correct.

One such prominent example came in Iowa in 2014, when most polling on the state’s open-seat U.S. Senate campaign showed a close race between Republican Joni Ernst and Democrat Bruce Braley. But the Iowa Poll late in that cycle showed Ernst ahead by 7 points, while almost all other polls showed the campaign much closer. Ernst won by 8.5 points.

Polling methods

Why did Selzer’s methods, which have served her so well in the past, not work in 2024?

“I wish I knew the answer to that. But like I said, there wasn’t anything that we saw (in the polling data) that needed to be fixed,” Selzer said Friday. “The reality is that more people supporting Donald Trump turned out.”

One staple of Selzer’s polling methodology is that she does not adjust her results to match Iowa’s partisan breakdown or previous election turnout. Her polls adjust only to match Iowa’s demographics, like age, gender and county residence.

In conducting her postelection analysis, Selzer found that had her poll results been adjusted to match Iowa’s 2020 election turnout, it would have shown Trump with a 6-point advantage. That still would have been 7 points off, but certainly closer than the poll reporting Harris with a 4-point advantage.

But Selzer stuck with her tried and true polling method. On Friday, she explained why.

“It comes back to the question of, how do I know before the election what the future electorate looks like,” she said. “We can’t really go back and look at what the turnout was before, because that might not be the turnout again.

“If we’d done that (in the past), imagine after 2012 when Barack Obama was re-elected, things would look very different (in the 2016 polls when Trump emerged). So, in hindsight, you say, ‘Wow, why didn’t you do that?’ Because it’s not science.”

Selzer will not conduct another election poll, but if she were preparing for 2026, she said she would not do anything differently despite the outcome of the final 2024 Iowa 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.”

“Iowa Press” can be seen on Iowa PBS at 7:30 p.m. Friday and noon Sunday, or online any time at iowapbs.org.

Comments: (515) 355-1300, erin.murphy@thegazette.com

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