The legendary Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer will retire from political surveying after a 16-point miss in Iowa this year at the presidential level, which left many political observers stunned given Ms. Selzer’s record of accurately predicting Iowa results over the last 25 years.
“Beyond election polls, my favorite projects were helping clients learn something they did not know to help them evaluate options for their companies, institutions or causes,” Ms. Selzer writes in a column for the Des Moines Register, which has been contracting her polling firm for decades. “That work may well continue, but I knew a few years ago that the election polling part of my career was headed to a close.”
Ms. Selzer says that she decided more than a year ago that her 2024 poll would be the last for the Des Moines Register.
“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,” Ms. Selzer wrote in her column.
Ms. Selzer won nationwide attention just days before the 2024 presidential election this year because her final survey suggested that Vice President Harris was leading President Trump by three points in Iowa — a state that broke for Trump decisively in both 2016 and 2020, and is now dominated by the GOP at the state level.
At the national level, pollsters were finding a dead heat between Ms. Harris and Trump, and liberals were quick to jump on Ms. Selzer’s pre-election survey as evidence of a silent majority supporting the vice president this year which pollsters weren’t capturing.
In the end, Trump won the state by 13 points.
“Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course,” Ms. Selzer says. “It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite. I am proud of the work I’ve 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.”
Ms. Selzer had a streak of accurately predicting — sometimes nearly down to the decimal point — the outcome of Iowa elections when other out-of-state pollsters couldn’t. She was the pollster who found President Obama would win the 2008 Iowa caucuses, that Senator Sanders was tied with Senator Clinton in the 2016 caucuses, and that Senator Grassley would win reelection by about 12 points in 2022.
After her 2024 poll was released, Ms. Selzer sat for an interview with the Bulwark, a center-right anti-Trump digital outlet. She told interviewer Tim Miller that one day, she would likely miss something so egregiously that it would be the end of her credibility.
“I’m prepared that one day it will not work, and I will blow up into tiny little pieces and be scattered across the city of Des Moines,” she said with a laugh.
