The Patriot Post® · A Last Word on the Iowa Polling Scandal
For as long as she lives, “renowned” pollster Ann Selzer will be remembered for a shamelessly dirty 11th-hour trick that failed.
Selzer, who heads the polling firm Selzer & Co. and does the surveying for the Des Moines Register and its Mediacom partner, released a deeply suspicious outlier of a poll just three days before Tuesday’s election. Her poll showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters in the Hawkeye State.
On Tuesday, Trump won Iowa by more than 13 points. So Selzer, 68, was off by more than 16 points, which nearly matches 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.
Selzer should thus chalk this one up as an in-kind contribution to the Harris campaign and hang ‘em up. She should never conduct another poll. That’s how bad this was.
As political analyst Josh Holmes put it, “This is probably the formal end of this poll. Thanks for the memories.”
Let’s hope so. I smelled a rat immediately, as did every other sentient human. Iowa had been safely in the Trump column for years, with the Hawkeye State going for Trump by eight points in 2020 and more than nine points in 2016. What’s more, the well-regarded Emerson poll of the Iowa race was released just an hour before Selzer’s poll. Emerson’s findings? Trump was comfortably ahead in Iowa, 53-43.
But guess which poll the mainstream media ignored and which poll they treated like the Rosetta Stone? As I wrote on Monday:
It’s hard to describe the frenzy, the giddiness, that overtook [Sunday’s] morning news shows. Take NBC’s “Meet the Press,” for example. Host Kristen Welker and her fellow Leftmedia lickspittles kept referring excitedly to Selzer’s Des Moines Register poll, but they didn’t once refer to the Emerson poll. Nor did they once use the word “outlier” in describing Selzer’s poll. The mainstream media did, however, promote the poll incessantly for a couple of news cycles. And this had the effect of energizing Democrat voters and depressing Republican voters just prior to the election. Talk about journalistic malpractice. Talk about election interference.
Get a load of how the normally sedate New Yorker described the poll’s purveyor: “Selzer is something of an institution in Beltway circles, a pollster known for her long record of accuracy and her willingness to publish outlier polls that go against the prevailing narrative. … Based on her years of work, the data journalist Nate Silver has given Selzer & Company an A+ rating.”
But as the left-leaning Silver’s own Saturday headline showed, he wasn’t fooled either. “A shocking Iowa poll means somebody is going to be wrong.”
And wrong Selzer was. Way wrong. Laughably, hilariously, face-plantingly wrong. More than 16 points wrong.
Indeed, Selzer’s extreme outlier of a poll was electioneering pollaganda, pure and simple. But listen to her mealy-mouthed non-apology, which she issued just before midnight on Tuesday, by which time it had already become clear that her poll — and her hard-earned reputation as a serious pollster —were garbage. She wrote:
Tonight, I’m, of course, thinking about how we got where we are. The poll findings we produced for The Des Moines Register and Mediacom did not match what the Iowa electorate ultimately decided in the voting booth today. I’ll be reviewing data from multiple sources with hopes of learning why that happened. And I welcome what that process might teach me.
We look forward to hearing all about Selzer’s self-inflicted struggle session.
“The Des Moines Register is closely reviewing the disparity between the results of the final Iowa Poll and the election results,” Executive Editor Carol Hunter said. “Throughout its 81 years, the mission of the Iowa Poll has been to reflect the unvarnished opinions of Iowans, without pressure or interpretation from politicians, media or others. With rare exceptions, the final Iowa Poll before elections has tracked closely with the actual vote.”
Nothing to see here, folks. Just one of those “rare exceptions.” As I wrote on Monday, “Somebody’s lying, and we’ll find out who when Trump wins Iowa comfortably on Tuesday.”
And sure enough.
POSTSCRIPT: In a Des Moines Register op-ed published Thursday, Selzer was spinning wildly, suggesting that the earth is flat, the lunar landing was faked, and that her pollaganda actually helped Donald Trump. She writes: “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.” Mmmkay. Memo to Ann: When you’ve reached rock-bottom, stop digging.