âWould I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course,â Selzer wrote.âŻâItâs ironic that itâs just the opposite.âŻI am proud of the work Iâve 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.â
The Iowa poll has taken on a near-mythical status over the past two decades, mostly driven by the stateâs role in the presidential nominating process. It was the only survey to nail the order of Democratic candidates in the 2004 caucuses. Selzerâs final poll before the 2008 caucuses accurately predicted that a surge of first-time caucus-goers would propel Barack Obama to a decisive victory.
At NRO, Jeffrey Blehar adds: Give Iowa Pollster Ann Selzer Her Due in Retirement.
More than any other pollster, ironically enough, it was Ann Selzer who convinced intelligent poll-watchers all the way back in 2016 that Iowa had flipped forever into MAGA Country, so before you laugh at her now, understand that she led the way and had to surprise thousands in the industry each time in order to do so.
But the 2024 omen was inauspicious indeed. Timed in advance or not, it feels like this was the right moment for Selzer to finally hang the olâ phone up on the cradle, if only because her polling methodology may have finally hit a wall. If you look at this list of Selzer & Co. final pre-election polls for every race since 1996, you will notice something about the final run of them, dating from 2016 specifically â yes, the Trump era. The error has always been in favor of Democrats. She whiffed on her 2018 call for Iowa governor by nearly 5 percent (and thus mistakenly had Kim Reynolds losing), but the error usually averaged out to about +2 in favor of the Dems . . . until it absolutely exploded this year. What happened?
Because we cannot know for sure, itâs time for some mild speculation. Selzer famously refuses to adjust or weight her polling numbers, instead trusting in her (up until now) proven ability to get the proper regional and demographic spread. This task has traditionally been easier in Iowa than most states, simply because of its overwhelming racial homogeneity. But one is tempted to wonder whether the methods Selzer made her name by using are of less value in an era of both extreme polarization as well as a special problem unique to our present culture that I like to call the âRevenge of the Karensâ â a severe overresponse from progressive women to polling phone calls, because they (disproportionately relative to the rest of the American population) feel self-actualized by registering their opinion, whether to a machine or especially to a live human being. When the Des Moines Register wrote up Selzerâs final shock 47â44 Harris poll at the beginning of November, they cited an apparent surge of female support that had put her over the top.
This was entirely illusory; note that Harris ended up with just 42.7 percent of the vote. The only explanation for the wild miss is a disproportionate female over-response: Understand that because of Selzerâs methodology, this is not an intentional oversampling or overweighting of polled women, but rather their natural response rate. That suggests any number of sociological phenomena this column is ill-equpped to begin unpacking here â but that are worth pondering in silence. In the meantime, even as I question whether Selzerâs classic methodology remains viable in a rapidly changing era, itâs worth saluting one of the great, and fearlessly individualistic, pollsters of the modern era. Give Ann Selzer her due in retirement.
Exit question: If landline phones are dying out, how do political polls work today?
(Via Joseph Campbell, who adds “#pollfail.”)
UPDATE: Disgraced Pollster Ann Selzer Retires After Iowa Poll Miss. ââLiterally the first comment I saw on Twitter after her Harris +3 poll was someone saying it was time for her to retire,â Mark Mitchell, the head pollster at Rasmussen Reports told me in response to the news. âThe only question now, is did she just buy a lake house?ââ
