Pollster Ann Selzer shocked political pundits with a poll showing Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump in Iowa a few days before the 2024 Presidential Election. Selzer now calls that poll “a spectacular miss.”
After President-elect Trump decisively won Iowa, Selzer announced she would be leaving public election polling. But she wants people to understand this pivot has been in the works for a long time.
Selzer founded the polling firm Selzer and Company in 1996, which became renowned for its accuracy and received an A+ grade from polling aggregation website FiveThirtyEight. After the 2016 election, she began asking herself if she wanted to continue spending her time in complicated and pressure-filled polling situations. For several years she’d been preparing to focus on private polling clients.
“The vision I had in my in my head is that I'd have another great, accurate poll, and then I'd say, now seems like a good time to end,” Selzer said in an interview with River to River's Ben Kieffer.
Unfortunately for Selzer, it didn’t work out that way, and due to the timing of her announcement, there has been plenty of speculation — and inaccurate comments — about her decision to pivot.
“I'm not retiring. I wasn't fired, I wasn't let go,” she said. “In particular, it is a coincidence, rather than a causal factor, that this poll was a miss. The miss didn't have any effect on my decision to leave. Maybe it affected the decision on timing that announcement, but the two are not related.”
Every day since the election, Selzer has thought about the poll and what could have gone wrong to produce a 16-point discrepancy between her results and the election results. She used the same methodology in this poll that she has used since 2008.
“My method, I think, had always been sort of the superstar behind my ability to let my data show me what the future electorate was going to look like,” she said.
However, the technology has changed since Selzer began polling. Cell phones, answering machines and caller ID all made it harder for pollsters to successfully cold call voters.
“I think there's not a single methodology out there that can do this work very well, and a lot of it relies on the good faith of people who are willing to answer their phone and engage in the conversation,” Selzer said. “And that, I think, has become the biggest barrier.”
After the election Selzer said she spoke to some of her phone bankers, who reported some people who didn’t complete the call, but instead just yelled “Trump” and hung up the phone.
“We just didn't get the cooperation from those Trump voters that in hindsight, you know, could have perhaps been more telling,” she said.
Since the election, Selzer has come under fire from Republicans accusing her of trying to influence the electorate. Trump called the poll voter suppression. On election night, Iowa GOP chair Jeff Kaufmann called on Republicans to cancel their subscriptions to the Des Moines Register.
“These are accusations of a criminal act, and I take that very seriously,” Selzer said. “They say it without any shred of evidence.”
She said it doesn’t make any sense that people have accused her of making up the numbers.
“You can go on the Des Moines Register website and you'll see an awful lot of numbers,” she said. “And we paid the phone bank to do it. We've got the receipt for that. We paid our sampling firm for the numbers that they use. We've got a receipt for that. If we were going to make up numbers, why would we spend money to do it? It just doesn't make any logical sense.”
Selzer said she will now be working with private clients to poll about issues such as soil health, conservation and fun projects — like how people who live on gravel roads feel about bikers.
“What I have loved about my career is dipping into different topic areas and doing something that the client needed to know and didn't know how to find it out.”
Despite ending her election polling career with a “spectacular miss,” she's able to laugh at herself. She says after years with titles like “the gold standard” and "queen of outlier polls,” she can own this moment.
“I’m going to shelve all of those and then people could just refer to me as ‘Miss Spectacular.’”
To hear this conversation, listen to River to River, hosted by Ben Kieffer. Caitlin Troutman and Samantha McIntosh produced this episode.
