A shocking survey reveals the Conservatives are not in a good position in their strong turn Iowa as Kamala Harris is leading Donald Trump by three points in the latest poll, being dubbed as a “stunning reversal” for the Republican. The final survey has been published in the Des Moines Register newspaper. It has put Kamala Harris at 47 per cent over Trump at 44 per cent. J Ann Selzer, the president of Selzer & Co, the company that conducted the poll, said, “It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming. She had clearly leaped into a leading position.” And this happened in a month and a half as Trump held a four-point lead over Harris and in June Trump was leading Biden by 18 points.
Election pundit Nate Silver reacted to the shocking poll and said it means somebody is going to be wrong. Anne Selzer of Selzer & Co has a long history of ‘bucking the conventional wisdom and being right,” Silver wrote.
“Releasing this poll took an incredible amount of guts because — let me state this as carefully as I can — if you had to play the odds, this time Selzer will probably be wrong. Harris’s chances of winning Iowa nearly doubled in our model from 9 per cent to 17 per cent tonight, which isn’t nothing. Polymarket shows a similar trend, moving from 6 percent to 18 percent after the survey. But that still places Harris’s odds at around 5:1 against,” Silver wrote.
The recent poll of 808 likely voters was done between October 28 and 31 and had a margin of 3.4 per cent of margin of error.
What might have gone wrong in Iowa?
Trump won Iowa both in 2016 and 2020 making Iowa a ruby-red state. But the nationally recognized poll shows Kamala Harris has picked up support from Iowa women — probably on the abortion issue. Robert F Kennedy Jr who abandoned his independent presidential campaign will remain on the Iowa ballot and he got 3 per cent of the vote which is down from 6 per cent in September and 9 per cent in June.
“The results come as Trump and Harris have focused their attention almost exclusively on seven battleground states that are expected to shape the outcome of the election. Neither has campaigned in Iowa since the presidential primaries ended, and neither campaign has established a ground presence in the state,” Des Moines Register said.
The poll revealed that older women and politically independent women are driving the recent shift towards Harris. “Age and gender are the two most dynamic factors that are explaining these numbers,” Selzer said.
