Breaking: A poll is not an election. Someone tell Iowa Republicans

An email popped into my inbox Tuesday from Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, linking to a video she made about the election

From the top it read “Iowans Spoke Loud and Clear” and “No matter what any ‘gold standard’ poll may say.”

Iowa Republicans won damn near everything in Iowa on Nov. 5. Their grip on control of this state is boa constrictor tight.

And yet, three weeks after those victories, some top Republicans can’t get over a preelection poll that didn’t properly forecast their dominance. I’m talking about the Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll released on Nov. 2.

It showed Democrat Kamala Harris with a three-point lead in Iowa. And it saw Democratic advantages in a couple of hotly contested congressional races. It was, of course, very wrong. Trump won the state by 14 points and Republicans won the congressional races.

The poll was conducted by the well-regarded Selzer & Company, run by pollster J. Ann Selzer, long seen as one of the best pollsters in the country.

Instead of being happy, Republicans are still demanding to know what happened. The president-elect of the United States on Sunday called for an investigation, again, of a poll.

“A totally Fake poll that caused great distrust and uncertainty at a very critical time. She knew exactly what she was doing,” Trump posted at Truth Social. He accused Selzer and the Register of “ELECTION FRAUD.”

This from the king of distrust and uncertainty.

A poll got the election outcome wrong, egregiously wrong. But there was no voting to defraud. Was Selzer willing to badly damage her hard-earned reputation just to make some Republicans feel anxious for a few days? Of course not.

The poll just got it wrong. Selzer had told the register some time ago that 2024 would be her last year of political polling. She’s moving on.

But Republican Party of Iowa Chairman Jeff Kaufmann, who loves nothing more than screaming at the media, sees a plot.

“Not only did she disrespect Iowa and our voters, but she caused Iowa to be laughed at by the entire country,” Kaufmann wrote in a column for the Washington Times. “Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register lost any shred of credibility they have left. Having Harris up 3 points is professional malpractice.”

Kaufmann claims the pollster has been working to “boost” Democrats for a decade. It’s obviously worked well. They’ve been boosted and tossed over an electoral cliff.

There are too many polls. Media outfits, particularly some newspapers that see polls as proof of prestige, are paying increasingly high prices for polling while they also cut journalists. Maybe this will be a moment of clarity.

A lot of Americans don’t want to answer a call or text from pollsters. The response rate to Pew Research Center polls was 36% during the 1990s. By 2018, it had dropped to 6 percent. David Byler, chief of research at Noble Predictive Insights, wrote in an MSNBC piece that a lack of responses makes gathering good data pricey.

But who cares? We don’t need any investigation. We just need to get a grip.

In our current dark, swampy politics, that’s like asking a boa constrictor to let go. We can’t let anything go.

(319) 398-8262; todd.dorman@thegazette.com