OAN Staff Abril Elfi
2:36 PM – Sunday, November 17, 2024
J. Ann Selzer, pollster who predicted Kamala Harris would win Iowa, has retired following a huge miss.
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On Sunday, Selzer announced her departure in a guest op-ed for The Des Moines Register and stated that she is planning to transition “to other ventures and opportunities.”
“Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course. It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite,” Selzer wrote.
The Saturday before Election Day, Selzer had released a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll in which she had projected Vice President Kamala Harris 3 points ahead of President-elect Donald Trump in the race for the state’s six electoral votes.
The prediction was a 7-point shift toward Harris from the same survey a month prior, and 16 points off the real election result.
The poll then began to spark hope among Democrats that Harris had a chance to win Iowa even though Trump had won it in 2016 and 2020.
Although Iowa was once considered a swing state, the state is now red and hasn’t voted for a Democrat in a presidential election since re-electing Barack Obama in 2012.
Seltzer posted on X doubling down that her departure wasn’t due to her poll miss.
“Oh, and mentions of ‘retirement’ are inaccurate. It’s been a long-time plan that this election would be my last work of this sort. Other work continues,” she said.
She also released a statement where she disclosed her post-mortem evaluation of the erroneous poll.
“Since election night, I’ve worked my way through possible explanations for the dramatic difference between the final Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll that my company conducted,” Selzer wrote in her report. “To cut to the chase, I found nothing to illuminate the miss.”
She concluded by stating that her poll just failed to pick up the shift among men of color towards the president-elect since 84% of the poll’s respondents were white.
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