This is out of the blue. J. Ann Selzer is the best pollster in the country. She is reknowned for predicting within one point the last three presidential winners. Nobody and I mean no.body. was expecting Donald Trump to lose ruby red Iowa. But either there has been some seismic shift in the electorate or Ann Selzer has suddenly lost her touch. I am going for the former. The seismic shift is that the GOP is utterly and egregiously out of touch with the electorate and the electorate may communicate that message to the Republicans in a few short days. This smoke signal coming up from Iowa is nothing to be ignored and it is not being ignored. The National Review says “nobody saw this coming.” I’ll bet.
While Trump has previously enjoyed the support of Iowa’s independent voters in the lead-up to this election, independent women now support Harris by a 28-point margin, while independent men break for Trump by a smaller margin.
Harris also won the support of the majority of voters age 65 and older. She won the support of senior women 63 percent to 28 percent, though she leads Trump among senior men by just two percentage points.
The poll was conducted among 808 likely Iowa voters between October 28 and 31 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
While Iowa was once seen as a battleground state, it has leaned increasingly red in the last decade. Though the state supported Democrats in six out of seven elections between 1992 and 2012, it has overwhelmingly voted in support of Trump in the last two elections.
It looks like Trump can color that support gone. This article in the National Review (William F. Buckley’s magazine) ends on the only positive note that it can, that Republicans are turning out for early voting and mail-in voting. That’s all well and good. But it might only mean that out of a finite number of Republican votes to be cast, the ones that are being cast are being cast early. I can tell you that here in Nevada I know personally of a few disgusted Republicans who have said that they’re “going to sit this one out.”
Additionally, if the Independents in Iowa are breaking for Harris to the tune of 28%, then that is no small thing.
I don’t know if Iowa is a microcosm of the rest of *red* states but if it is, Trump is in for one hell of a rude awakening on Tuesday. Just think about it: the GOP has taken an incredibly unpopular stance with respect to abortion, not to mention all the racist gaffes and insensitivity. Plus, they’ve got a tired old Catskills comic who makes a fool of himself getting into a truck at the top of the ticket. This does not equate with credibility, let’s just say that much.
America will speak her mind on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Iowa has spoken and again this poll is the gold standard. Thus spake Ann Selzer.
There are always post mortems that attend any losing election. That goes with the territory. I think it’s safe to hypothesize that whatever is left of the old GOP, whomever is left, in the event of a Trump loss, particularly a bloody beating of a loss, they better sit down and decide what’s to become of conservatism. Because it looks like caving in to MAGA, as they have all done, is going to bring the party to its knees.
Granting just for the sake of argument that Selzer is right and Harris takes Iowa, I wonder what other red enclaves she might take? Indiana? Kansas? One of the Dakotas? This could be an historical routing of Trump and I hope that it is precisely that.
If the majority of us VOTE these pissants out of power, including the down ballot races, then the Democrats need to grow a set and legitimately PROSECUTE the insurrectionists at the highest level, reform the Supreme Court, restore Roe, restore the standards of truth in media, outlaw buying our politicians, rescind the cannabis laws, and a slew of other things to promote social justice. Oh…and STOP giving weapons to the fascist running Israel. If all this were to come to pass, America would stand as a beacon for freedom. We’ll see…
One step at a time. Let’s win the election first. I am blown away by the Selzer poll. Simply blown away. This could be 2008 all over again.
‘If’…a powerful word.
Who would have thought that taking a constitutional right off half the population would have consequences?
Republicans.
The FAFO party.
Here in Iowa, it has been a torrid few years with the likes of the doddering Trump maxim supporter, Chuck Grassley, who said at a town meeting, he supported Trump, “without reservations”, then there is the motorcycle queen of Iowa, Joni Ernst, who, when first appearing in Iowa was quoting the Koch Brothers desires to eliminate restrictions and units of our government because, with all their pollution at the paper factories, all the maximum damning leaks and spills of their pipelines, they had to pay millions in fines and damage control …
With the Koch Brother’s billions of spare change, (eighty billion split between two brothers each year), it was easy to push Joni into the Senate seat she still holds …
All down the line, the GOP has pushed out our good democrats with money pushes of large quantity, building insurmountable grips on our futures and comfort zones …
It was my wife and I’s pleasure to vote for all the Democrat seats we could … Not as many as we would like to, but never the less, as op’s occur going forward, we will persist …