Okay, What About the Selzer Poll

If you don’t know what I’m talking about it’s kind of hard to know where to start.

The simplest explanation is that there’s a pollster named Ann Selzer. Her home base and speciality is Iowa but she also does national polling. She has a very good track record. For various reasons among data nerds she’s taken on a kind of legendary status in recent cycles, not only for accuracy but also in 2016 and 2020 for releasing final polls that picked up in advance the surprises that came on election day. In other words, she has a record of outlier last polls that are later vindicated by election results. The almost totemic treatment of this poll can’t not be seen as a bit overblown. But Selzer has a very good record. There’s no getting around that.

Her final poll of Iowa, which is of course now a securely red state, was slated to come out at 7 pm this evening. People were eagerly the results to see whether Trump or Harris might be doing better than you’d expect for Iowa. It’s a given that Trump will win Iowa. The question everyone had is whether Selzer’s poll would say Trump’s margin was bigger or narrower than one might expect.

The poll came out and Harris was beating Trump by 3 percentage points. 47-44. No one considered anything like that a possibility. It’s sent a shockwave through election land.

What does it mean?