Donald Trump sent a shock wave through the polling industry — not by beating his polls but by suing a legendary pollster. Trump is going after Ann Selzer, a highly respected pollster who predicted Barack Obama’s meteoric rise in the 2008 Iowa Democratic caucuses and saw Trump’s strength in 2020 when others underestimated him. Selzer whiffed in 2024 — predicting that Kamala Harris would win Iowa by three points, days before Trump won by 13 points.
Selzer calculated that if she had weighted her poll to get a more reasonable balance of Trump’s and Biden’s 2020 supporters, Trump would have led Harris in her poll by six points — erasing more than half of her 16 point error. That’s not a perfect result. But a Trump+6 poll in a Trump+13 state would qualify as a temporary embarrassment — not a career-ending error.