President-elect Donald Trump is calling to ‘fully investigate’ the Iowa pollster who predicted him losing in heavily red state just days before November’s election.
The Des Moines Register/Mediacom survey conducted by Ann Selzer of Selzer & Company showed Harris at 47 percent support to Trump’s 44 percent.
Iowa had gone red for Trump in the last two election cycles after twice voting for Democratic President Barack Obama – and had not been considered to be a battleground state in 2024.
Despite easily winning the Hawkeye State, Trump posted on his Truth Social that he still plans to investigate Selzer, 68, over possible election fraud.
‘A totally Fake poll that caused great distrust and uncertainty at a very critical time. She knew exactly what she was doing,’ Trump wrote.
‘Thank you to the GREAT PEOPLE OF IOWA for giving me such a record breaking vote, despite possible ELECTION FRAUD by Ann Selzer and the now discredited “newspaper” for which she works. An investigation is fully called for!’
At the time Trump charged that Selzer over-polled Democrats to make it look like Harris, the Democratic nominee, was in the lead.
Selzer’s poll for the Register and Mediacom days before the election predicted Harris would win by +3 percentage points. But Trump went on to trounce the vice president by over +13 points in the Hawkeye State.
Trump tore into the survey, calling Selzer a ‘Trump hater’ and insisting that Iowa’s farmers ‘love’ him.
‘All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT,’ he scathed on his social media website Truth Social.
Ann Selzer had built a reputation as ‘Iowa’s Polling Queen’ and the ‘best pollster in politics’ over decades of conducting the Des Moines Register political surveys but on Sunday she announced her retirement after her results wildly missed the mark.
Selzer had accurately predicted each of the presidential outcomes going back to 2008, giving her a Nostradamus-like reputation that drew eyeballs to her incorrect 2024 results.
On Sunday, Selzer revealed she is retiring from The Register to pursue polling for other clients.
‘Over a year ago I advised the Register I would not renew when my 2024 contract expired with the latest election poll as I transition to other ventures and opportunities,’ she said.
‘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.
‘Polling is a science of estimation, and science has a way of periodically humbling the scientist. So, I’m humbled, yet always willing to learn from unexpected findings.’
Following Trump’s landslide victory, Selzer admitted her research was completely wrong and might have even emboldened MAGA nation.
‘I told more than one news outlet that the findings from this last poll could actually energize and activate Republican voters who thought they would likely coast to victory,’ she said. ‘Maybe that’s what happened.’
She continued an attempt to defend her methodology, which came as a complete shock to voters the weekend prior to the election.
‘The poll findings we produced for The Des Moines Register and Mediacom did not match what the Iowa electorate ultimately decided in the voting booth today,’ she said.
Although the results were within the margin of error, it gave Harris supporters hope that she could flip the state they had previously written off.
The Register survey sent shockwaves through the market – triggering a flood of wagers on Harris to win the election.
During her CNN appearance she explained how her poll got it so wrong.
‘When former President Trump said we interviewed more Democrats, well that’s what came out of our data. We did nothing to make that happen,’ she said.
In order to discern likely voters, pollsters ask voters how likely they are to vote and try to create a model of the electorate.
In the data being collected by Selzer it found more Iowa Democrats were motivated.
The Selzer poll also showed that older women were breaking for Harris in a way that other surveys potentially hadn’t picked up on.
‘I’m a big believer in keeping my fingers off, my dirty fingers off the data. So we did it the way, we did it when he won in our final poll twice, in two election cycles, very same method,’ Selzer said.
She noted that the ‘best news’ she can deliver to any of her client is good data.
‘The best news that I can deliver is my best shot of what’s true, because then you know what you’re working with and you can make adjustments as you need to,’ she said.