Republican nominee for president Donald Trump is deriding a new poll that shows him losing to Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in Iowa, falsely purporting that the survey is a form of “suppression” that is somehow criminal in nature.
The Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll, a well-regarded and typically accurate survey, released its final results ahead of the 2024 presidential election, finding that a plurality of voters in the state prefer Harris over Trump by a margin of three points.
Harris attained 47 percent support from likely voters in the poll, versus 44 percent who said they were going to vote for Trump. The three-point difference is within the poll’s margin of error, but J. Ann Selzer, who runs the survey on behalf of the Des Moines Register, said the results show that Harris is the clear leader in Iowa right now.
Much of her analysis indicated that Trump wasn’t losing support in the state so much as Harris was gaining support — similar to what was observed in the poll from September.
“Our analysis then was, it wasn’t that people were switching their allegiances [from the poll in June], it was that more people were qualifying as likely voters in September…. [who said] they will definitely vote” in this year’s race, Selzer explained, adding that there was a “bigger number of likely voters” in that poll, a trend that continued in the recently published survey.
The poll also showed that Democrats have the potential to flip two of the state’s four House seats, which are currently held by Republican representatives. If true, Iowa could potentially play a role in flipping overall control of the House to Democrats.
Trump was angered by the poll’s results, blasting them on his Truth Social site after they were published. He described Selzer as a “Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT.” During a rally over the weekend, Trump also suggested that she should face criminal repercussions for publishing the poll.
“It’s called suppression,” Trump falsely asserted, referring to The Des Moines Register poll. “They suppress, and it actually should be illegal.”
Beyond being wrong about the poll’s motivations (and his fascist demands for anyone who undermines his authority to be punished), Trump is also wrong about the poll’s accuracy. While every poll could potentially be an outlier, Selzer’s polling methods have been widely regarded, and the survey she conducted in the last presidential race was remarkably close.
According to an aggregate of polling data collected by RealClearPolling from 2020, pollsters predicted a 2-point advantage for Trump in Iowa against President Joe Biden. Selzer’s poll, however, predicted a 7-point win for Trump in the state. Trump went on to win Iowa by around 8 points.
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