| Clare Malone
Staff writer  Photograph by Scott Olson / Getty On Saturday evening, the politically on-edge of America, who, in the final days of the election, are nourished by any new scraps of data about the potential makeup of the electorate, were fed an unexpected morsel. The pollster Ann Selzer’s final survey of the state of Iowa showed Kamala Harris beating Donald Trump, forty-seven per cent to forty-four per cent. It was a stunning result; in 2020, Trump won the state by more than eight points, with fifty-three per cent of the vote. Selzer is something of an institution in Beltway circles, a pollster known for her long record of accuracy and her willingness to publish outlier polls that go against the prevailing narrative. Pollsters tend to “herd” when they’re nervous that their results might be wrong, fiddling with variables to come up with something that looks more like what everyone else is predicting. Selzer’s latest poll did anything but that. Based on her years of work, the data journalist Nate Silver has given Selzer & Company an A+ rating. And that’s why the results of her poll made the rounds over the weekend. If Trump could be losing in a white, Midwestern state like Iowa, could that indicate some fundamental weakness in his support? Selzer’s poll found that Independent voters were breaking toward Harris, largely based on the support of women over the age of sixty-five, who favored her by a two-to-one margin. “Age and gender are the two most dynamic factors that are explaining these numbers,” Selzer told the Des Moines Register. If Selzer’s poll is correct in capturing some late shift in the campaign, it means that Harris would be “heavily favored,” as Silver put it in a Substack post, to win the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. And that would mean a Harris Presidency, not a Trump second act. | 
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