Pure sleaziness. Pure Trump-hating sleaziness. That’s the kindest, gentlest way I can describe a piece of electioneering pollaganda from an ostensibly reputable pollster named Ann Selzer.

Selzer, who heads the polling firm Selzer & Co. and does the surveying for the Des Moines Register and its Mediacom partner, released a poll on Saturday that shows Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters in the Hawkeye State. As the Register reports, “The results follow a September Iowa Poll that showed Trump with a 4-point lead over Harris and a June Iowa Poll showing him with an 18-point lead over Democratic President Joe Biden, who was the presumed Democratic nominee at the time.”

The purportedly reputable poll is, in fact, an extreme outlier — somewhat akin to, although not as severe as, the infamous 2020 Washington Post-ABC News poll that showed Joe Biden leading Trump by 17 points in Wisconsin just days before the election in a state that Biden won by half a point.

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” gushed Selzer. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”

Clearly? Because of the results of one weird poll? Take a look at the fine print of the poll itself. It says, “Margin of error: plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.” This means that even if we’re to believe Selzer’s poll, Harris’s three-point lead over Trump is within the poll’s margin of error, essentially a tie. And yet the cheerleading Selzer says Harris “has clearly leaped into a leading position.” This is not only nonsensical; it’s sleazy.

Needless to say, Donald Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, isn’t buying what Selzer is selling. “Des Moines Register is a clear outlier poll,” Fabrizio writes. “Emerson College, released today, far more closely reflects the state of the actual Iowa electorate and does so with far more transparency in their methodology.”

As political analyst Josh Holmes put it, “This is probably the formal end of this poll. Thanks for the memories.”

“Grab a drink and enjoy a good laugh,” said columnist Matt Vespa, “because no one should be fooled by this poll — no one. It’s one of the grossest attempts at suppression polling as we approach D-Day for the 2024 election.”

Voter suppression, election interference — how else are we to describe it? And what’s with the secrecy behind Selzer’s polling methodology? As Fox News media critic Joe Concha posted, “And here we go. Question — MSNBC folks — what are the crosstabs on this poll? Because the pollster won’t release that for whatever reason.”

“For whatever reason”? We could hazard a guess: Perhaps Selzer wildly oversampled Democrats.

How do we know Selzer’s poll is an outlier and not reflective of some sudden and radical shift in the Iowa electorate? Because on the same day, Saturday, the well-regarded Emerson College polling firm released its own poll of the Iowa race, which showed Trump comfortably ahead of Harris, 53-43. In addition, Insider Advantage pollster Matt Towery told Sean Hannity last night that his soon-to-be-released poll has Trump up around seven points. Both of these polls are in line with recent polling in Iowa, which Trump won by just over eight points in 2020 and more than nine points in 2016.

And both are a far cry from Selzer’s ridiculous findings. Former George W. Bush senior advisor Karl Rove has analyzed a poll or two in his day, and here’s what he said of the Register’s poll: “Look, the Iowa poll — Ann Selzer is a great pollster, and has a great track record. However, she’s suggesting that the state, in this poll, basically has moved 11 points away from Donald Trump. One of our every five people who supported Donald Trump no longer supports him. I think we’d feel that.”

We’d feel it all right. And we’d have seen it in the polling. And yet the mainstream media nonetheless hyped Selzer’s poll to no end while utterly ignoring the Emerson poll. Indeed, it’s hard to describe the frenzy, the giddiness, that overtook yesterday’s morning news shows. Take NBC’s “Meet the Press,” for example. Host Kristen Welker and her fellow Leftmedia lickspittles kept referring excitedly to the Register poll, but they didn’t once refer to the Emerson poll. Nor did they once use the word “outlier” in referring to the Register poll. Talk about journalistic malpractice. At least North Dakota Governor Doug Bergum was there to correct them.

WATCH: A new Des Moines Register poll shows Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump in Iowa within the margin of error.

Gov. @DougBurgum says he would be “completely shocked” if Trump lost Iowa.

“I think Trump’s still going to confidently win Iowa.” pic.twitter.com/VhsBnt17oq

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) November 3, 2024

This is the Democrats’ November surprise. The race had seemed to settle in during the past 10 days or so, with Trump leading narrowly nationally and in the battleground states. So the Democrats had to somehow give their gal a boost. And what could provide a better boost than a poll showing her surging at the finish?

Somebody’s lying, and we’ll find out who when Trump wins Iowa comfortably on Tuesday. But the election-interfering damage will already have been done: In the final days before the election, Democrats and their mainstream and hard-left allies will trumpet this bizarre poll as “proof” of a late surge for Harris, thereby dominating the news cycle and energizing their heretofore downtrodden base all across the country.

Call it an in-kind get-out-the-vote donation from Selzer and Co. to the Democrat Party.

On the bright side, nearly 75 million Americans have already voted — which is more than half of the 155 million who voted in 2020 — so the damage of this despicable ploy is somewhat mitigated. But the relative sliver of late deciders — those who somehow can’t seem to figure out whether they prefer the proven America First leadership of Trump or the miserably failed leftism of Harris — might well be influenced by the bandwagon effect noted by our Mark Alexander way back in 2008: “the human tendency of those who do not have a strong ideological foundation to aspire to the side perceived to be in the majority.”

Strange, but the Leftmedia isn’t paying any attention to the most accurate pollster of the 2020 election. That would be AtlasIntel, whose final poll for the 2024 campaign shows Trump ahead nationally 49% to 47.2%.

The stakes couldn’t be higher in this election, and we’ll find out soon enough who was right about the polling. But the eleventh-hour dirty trick by Ann Selzer and the mainstream media won’t soon be forgotten.