Eleven months ago, The Des Moines Register released the results of a statewide poll showing Donald Trump well ahead in the Republican Party’s presidential caucuses. At the time, the former president described the survey as “a big beautiful poll,” and singled out pollster J. Ann Selzer for praise.
The newspaper, the GOP candidate said, has “a great pollster — actually very, very powerful pollster, very good, talented pollster.”
That was before The Des Moines Register published the results of its latest statewide poll:
Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in Iowa — a startling reversal for Democrats and Republicans who have all but written off the state’s presidential contest as a certain Trump victory. A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Vice President Harris leading former President Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters just days before a high-stakes election that appears deadlocked in key battleground states.
“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” Selzer said.
That’s true. Trump won Iowa with relative ease in the last two election cycles; the Hawkeye State has been drifting into deeper shades of red in recent years; and as recently as June, when President Joe Biden was still seeking a second term, the same pollster found the former president ahead by 18 points.
And yet, the latest results found Harris with a three-point advantage. (The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. Click the link for more information on the poll’s methodology.)
Is the poll an outlier? That’s entirely possible, and given the fact that Democrats haven’t flooded Iowa with ads and appearances in recent weeks, it’s a safe bet that the Harris campaign’s internal polling isn’t nearly as favorable as the Register/Mediacom results.
If pressed, I could probably come up with some kind of rationalization to help justify the findings — an unpopular Republican-imposed abortion ban recently took effect in the state, for example — but all things considered, either Selzer’s numbers are an outlier, or the Democratic vice president is poised to enjoy Election Day quite a bit.
But just as interesting as the data was the GOP candidate’s reaction to the data.
Shortly after the newspaper published the polling results, Trump published an item on his social media platform condemning the data as “heavily skewed ... by a Trump hater.”
Remember, it was less than a year ago when the former president celebrated Selzer as a “great,” “very good,” and “talented” pollster. Now, however, the public is supposed to dismiss her as little more than “a Trump hater.”
Hours after publishing the online item, the Republican nominee spoke at a rally, and in reference to the release of polling data he didn’t like, he added, “It’s called suppression. They suppress. And it actually should be illegal.”
Trump went on to describe polls — at least the ones that tell him what he doesn’t want to hear — as “corrupt.”
What does Trump intend to do about pollsters who release data that he considers “illegal”? It’s difficult to say, though I suppose it’ll depend on whether or not he wins a second term.