Editorial: Sickening Iowa presidential poll an insult to voters

The Iowa pollster being slammed by Team Trump is quitting. Too late, the damage is done.

Her dismal prognosticating on the eve of the election became a major story. Iowa was swinging over to VP Kamala Harris? A red state going blue? The timing was atrocious and arguably manipulative.

Pollster Ann Selzer got it wrong! She’s moving on to “other ventures and opportunities,” she now writes, but what about the rest of the nation?

Selzer wrote in last Sunday’s Des Moines Register that “polling is a science of estimation, and science has a way of periodically humbling the scientist. So, I’m humbled, yet always willing to learn from unexpected findings.”

There are a few words that sum up her thinking, baloney is one.

Polling has its place in American politics. The pulse of the nation is worth taking whenever possible. But timing in this business is everything. A poll on Nov. 1, which fell on the Friday before the election, was news through the weekend leading up to the Tuesday, Nov. 5 presidential election.

How was this fair? It was too late for the pollster to admit she got it wrong. So now the media takes another hit. Thanks, Des Moines Register.

The poll showed Harris leading by 3 percentage points. In the actual vote, Trump won Iowa by 13 points, the Register’s editor Carol Hunter wrote in a post-mortem.

It’s sickening.

This razor-thin election turned out to be a Red Rebound. As we’ve written in this space before, all the pollster had to do was spend an hour in the grocery line. That’s where you would find just about everyone praying the bill would be under $100. Did the pollster go shopping? It’s clear that did not happen.

Another poll, taken after the election, backs this up: “The economy has ranked as the most important issue on the national exit poll since 2008, and this year voters expressed deep dissatisfaction with the nation’s economy. Two-thirds said the condition of the U.S. economy is not so good or poor, and about a third said it’s excellent or good,” the PennToday Nov. 6 exit poll reported.

That’s a textbook example of a solid poll. No baloney, there’s that word again, just opinions on voting trends.

The Des Moines pollster was trying to pump up her own brand over what should be her primary goal — the truth.

The Trump administration comes into office with a mandate to make this country better. That’s how the vote went. Just look at the chart below. Facts don’t lie.

The PennToday poll adds: “About half of voters said inflation during the last year has caused them moderate hardship, about 2 in 10 said inflation has caused them severe hardship, and 24% reported that inflation has caused them no hardship. Overall, 51% said they trust Trump over Harris to handle the economy.”

Teamsters boss Sean O’Brien said he saw this coming eight months ago.

“There’s got to be a vision,” O’Brien told the Herald. “This election clearly signaled American people were fed up.”

The angst in the Democratic party after an election that swept Trump back into the White House — and with Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress — is a stinging rebuke of the party of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, he added.

“The Democrats need a reset,” he added. So does the Des Moines pollster.