SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
In just a matter of days, we will know whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States. Until the polls close Tuesday night, though, the best guess we've had has been public opinion polling. And this weekend gave us a final snapshot with, among other surveys, one of the most high-profile polls in the country issuing its findings. The Iowa Poll, published by the Des Moines Register and conducted by J. Ann Selzer's firm, Selzer & Company, found something rather surprising - Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump in Iowa of all places, a state that has drifted further and further to the right in recent elections.
Now this matters because when the polling industry largely missed the mark in the past two presidential races, Selzer did not. When we spoke, Selzer said one explanation for Harris' gains could be the number of voters she polled who say they will definitely vote - a total that increased among women, young people and those with college degrees.
J ANN SELZER: Those are demographics that favor Democrats, and so Kamala Harris was the beneficiary of that. It wasn't that Donald Trump lost ground in terms of the raw number of respondents who were supporting him. It's just that Kamala Harris benefited from an influx of people now saying that they are definitely going to vote.
DETROW: There's been such a focus on the gender gap, especially the way that the Harris and Trump campaign have really been appealing their messages, particularly to women or particularly to men in Trump's case. What was the gender gap that you saw with these results in Iowa?
SELZER: Yeah. And we've been told by people who work with candidates all the time that if you're working the gender gap, you want to win more with one sex than you lose to the other, and Harris is doing exactly that. So 52-38 Trump leads among men; 56-36, a 20-point gap, Harris is leading with women, likely voters in Iowa.
DETROW: And there's a story about older voters, older women in particular, right?
SELZER: It's more than a 2 to 1 ratio of Harris to Trump - 63-28 among women the age 65 and over. Now, Harris leads with men age 65 and over, but it's just a two-point gap.
DETROW: I asked about one of the big questions of this election, which is the gender gap. Another big question, especially the way that the Harris campaign has focused its message in recent weeks, is whether Harris is able to successfully convince some Republicans to cross the aisle. Did you see signs of that?
SELZER: Not much.
DETROW: Yeah.
SELZER: Not much - I can tell you that less than 1% of Democrats were crossing over to vote for Trump. There's a small single-digit percentage of Republicans crossing over to vote for Harris.
DETROW: So much has been made broadly of how hard it is to find the right mix of voters right now. What is the broad explanation of how you are approaching determining what the electorate is going to look like?
SELZER: Well, I do it the same way I've been doing it. I've made no change in that, to be clear. And this is going to get a little wonky. What I want to do is to collect data that will reveal to me what the future electorate is going to look like. I call it polling forward. I call people who are weighting their data looking at past elections polling backward.
DETROW: This is now the third presidential cycle in a row where your final poll looks very different than the conventional wisdom and what most other polls are showing. The last two times, of course, you showed that Trump was doing much better than most observers thought, and you nailed that final Iowa result near perfectly. I'm curious what you're thinking when you see that initial wave of data and think, wow, this is going to be an outlier.
SELZER: Well, you know, when I was younger and this would happen, there would be a certain amount of anxiety and stress and stomach-churning events. I've been called the outlier queen. So I've sat in this chair before. And, you know, I have a little talk with myself. And I say, look, either my numbers will be good, in which case, I'll be golden, or my numbers will be bad, in which case, I'll be a skunk. And I'm prepared to deal with it either way.
DETROW: So even on a day like this where you have Trump himself kind of attacking you on the polls, you're not fazed by it.
SELZER: I'm not fazed by it.
DETROW: That is pollster J. Ann Selzer. Thank you so much for talking to us.
SELZER: My pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
