After 27 years of surveying Iowans for the Des Moines Register, J. Ann Selzer will no longer be conducting the Iowa Poll for the newspaper.
“Over a year ago I advised the Register I would not renew when my 2024 contract expired with the latest election poll as I transition to other ventures and opportunities,” Selzer said in a column published by the Register on Sunday.
In a separate column published on Sunday, Register Executive Editor Carol Hunter wrote, “For a couple of years now, [Selzer] has discussed with me a timetable for winding down her work on the poll. She notified me over a year ago that she would not renew when her 2024 contract ended with the publication of the pre-election poll.
Since starting her work on the Iowa Poll in 1997, Selzer has developed a reputation as one of the best state-level political pollsters in the country. She attracted national attention for willingness to publish polls that were outliers that accurately reflected the political reality in Iowa other pollsters were missing. Selzer & Co.’s final poll of Democrats in the 2008 Iowa Caucus showed Barack Obama winning handily, something others missed. She also accurately predicted both of Donald Trump’s Iowa victories in the 2016 and 2020 presidential election. But her final poll in this year’s election was an outlier that proved to be very wrong.
The Iowa Poll conducted Oct. 28-31 found a three percentage point lead for Kamala Harris. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. But it quickly became clear as vote totals began to be posted on Election Night that the poll was off base.
Trump won Iowa by 13 percentage points, the biggest margin of victory in Iowa for any presidential candidate since Richard Nixon in 1972.
“Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course,” Selzer wrote. ”It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite. I am proud of the work I’ve done for the Register, for the Detroit Free Press, for the Indianapolis Star, for Bloomberg News and for other public and private organizations interested in elections. They were great clients and were happy with my work.”
Republicans, however, were not happy with Selzer’s last poll.
“This should be classified as spreading propaganda with polling like this,” Iowa GOP Chair Jeff Kaufman, a Trump loyalist, said when the poll was released.
Trump denounced the poll on social media and in speeches.
“One of my enemies just put out a poll, I’m three down,” he said during a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, the day after the Register published the poll.
During the course of his rambling speech, Trump called the poll “fake,” suggested an unspecified “they” had manipulated the results to hurt his chances of winning (“They can make those polls sing. They can make them sing. They brag about it.”) and said publishing the poll should be a crime.
“It’s called suppression,” he said. “They suppress. And it actually should be illegal.”
Selzer & Co. conducted a review of the October poll in an attempt to determine what went wrong, and published a 19-page report on the review.
“I’ve read and listened to a lot of theories on the subject,” Selzer wrote at the beginning of the report. “To cut to the chase, I found nothing to illuminate the miss.”
Trump reacted to the news that Selzer was leaving the Iowa Poll with a rant on Truth Social.
“A totally Fake poll that caused great distrust and uncertainty at a critical time,” he said, linking to Selzer’s column. “She knew exactly what she was doing. Thank you to the GREAT PEOPLE OF IOWA for giving me such a record breaking vote, despite possible ELECTION FRAUD by Ann Selzer and the now discredited ‘newspaper’ for which she works. An investigation is fully called for!”
“Polling is a science of estimation, and science has a way of periodically humbling the scientist,” Selzer wrote in her column. “So, I’m humbled, yet always willing to learn from unexpected findings.”
She added, “My integrity means a lot to me. To those who have questioned it, there are likely no words to dissuade.”
The Register has published the Iowa Poll since 1943. In her column, Hunter said, “Register editors are evaluating the best ways to continue surveys that will provide accurate information and insight about issues that matter to Iowans.”
