Pollster who predicted Kamla Harris would win Iowa retires after massive miss

She’s going out on a low note.J.

Ann Selzer is retiring from election polling just weeks after her once-respected poll showed that Kamala Harris was leading in Iowa — only for Trump to win the state by more than 13 percentage points on Election Day.The much-mocked Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll, released the Saturday before Election Day, erroneously projected Vice President Kamala Harris 3 points ahead of President-elect Donald Trump in the race for Iowa’s six electoral votes.That was a 7-point shift toward Harris from the same survey a month prior, and 16 points off the real election result.

The poll sent shockwaves across the country, sparking hope among Democrats that Harris had a chance to win a state that Trump carried effortlessly in 2016 and 2020.Once considered a swing state, Iowa is now reliably red, and hasn’t voted for a Democrat in a presidential contest since reelecting Barack Obama in 2012.

In a guest op-ed for The Des Moines Register, the veteran Iowa pollster claimed her departure has been in the works for over a year, and plans to transition “to other ventures and opportunities.” “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,” Selzer wrote.Still, the timing of this transition raised some eyebrows on X, where Selzer doubled down that her departure wasn’t due to her imprecise Iowa poll.

“Oh, and mentions of ‘retirement’ are inaccurate.It’s been a long-time plan that this election would be my last work of this sort.

Other work continues,” she tweeted.Selzer, who heads up the polling and public affairs firm Selzer & Co., has been conducting the Des Moines Register’s Iowa poll since 1987.The same morning she announced her retirement, she released a document on X disclosing her post-mortem evaluation of the erroneous Iowa poll — which came up short on explaining what went wrong.

“Since election ...