Enraged Trump Threatens To “Fully Investigate” Pollster Ann Selzer, “She Knew What She Was Doing”

Maybe this is how the persecution of the innocent begins, with an A+ rated pollster who was merely doing her job and did a last presidential poll before retiring, as she had announced she would do in 2023. You remember what a stir the Des Moines Register poll started the week before the election when it showed Kamala Harris three points up. And what is tragic here, is that Donald Trump, ever the vindictive child, is out to get Ann Selzer for simply doing her job. He is reading all kinds of malice into the poll.

Trump’s vote was not “record breaking” many a Republican has won as big in Iowa or bigger. But it’s always superlatives with him. I don’t know what he proposes to “investigate.” The woman has been doing her job for many years and earned a reputation as the Queen Of Polling. I don’t know what went wrong here. I also don’t know what went wrong in Nevada where Jon Ralston, the Oracle Of Nevada, called the state for Harris and it went to Trump. I, for one, don’t blame Ann Selzer for quitting the game. She used to call races within one point and now she was 16 points off.

J Ann Selzer, the celebrated Iowa election pollster, announced on Sunday that she is moving on “to other ventures and opportunities”, two weeks after her survey in the state wrongly predicted a strong shift to Kamala Harris in the days before the election.

That poll, which projected a 47% to 44% lead for the vice-president over Donald Trump on the back of older women breaking for Democrats over the issue of reproductive rights, came three days before the national vote, giving Democrats false hope that Harris could win the White House decisively. When the votes were counted, Selzer was off by 16 points as the former president won the state decisively.

Selzer, known as the “queen of polling”, shot to fame in 2008 when she predicted that a virtually unknown senator, Barack Obama, would beat frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses.

She told MSNBC before the vote that Harris was leading in early voting in Iowa “because of her strength with women generally, even stronger with women aged 65 and older. Her margin is more than 2-to-1 – and this is an age group that shows up to vote, or votes early, in disproportionately large numbers.”

Trump disputed the poll in a post on his Truth Social network at the time.

“In fact, it’s not even close! All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT.”

According to unofficial results, Trump ultimately won Iowa by 13 points, 56% to 43%.

In a column published by the Des Moines Register on Sunday, Selzer wrote that public opinion polling had been her “life’s work” and had made a decision to step back from it a year ago.

“Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course,” she wrote. “It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite.”

Seltzer ventured that her strong track record had “maybe that history of accuracy made the outlier position too comfortable”.

“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,” she added.

For his part, however, Trump is as difficult in victory as he is in defeat. He can’t graciously lose and he can’t graciously win. There is nothing gracious at all about the man. I hope he doesn’t expend time and government resources going after a blameless pollster but who knows? This is exactly the kind of nuttiness that Matt Gaetz is on board for.

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