Pollster Ann Selzer announced her retirement from election polling after one of the biggest misses of the 2024 election cycle.
Selzer, a highly accredited pollster, shocked the political world in the final week of the 2024 election when she released a poll in ruby-red Iowa showing Vice President Kamala Harris up by three points. The results sent panic through the Trump camp and a renewed burst of optimism throughout the Harris camp — if true, it would have likely spelled doom for Trump in areas with similar demographics.
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Instead, the poll ended up being one of the election’s most inaccurate — she was off by nearly 16 points. Trump won the state by 13 points.
Selzer announced her retirement from election polling on Sunday after a decadeslong career.
However, she insisted the decision had nothing to do with the polling error. Over a year before, she had informed the Des Moines Register that she would not be renewing her contract in 2024. She had been performing election polling for the outlet since 1997.
“Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course. It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite,” Selzer wrote.
“Polling is a science of estimation, and science has a way of periodically humbling the scientist,” she added. “So, I’m humbled, yet always willing to learn from unexpected findings.”
The Des Moines Register commissioned a post-mortem of the poll after the election, though it concluded that “no likely single culprit has emerged to explain the wide disparity.”
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Selzer, who earned an A+ rating from data analyst Nate Silver’s analysis of polls’ accuracy, defended her record, saying, “Maybe that history of accuracy made the outlier position too comfortable.”
The Iowa pollster gained fame as the only pollster to correctly predict that Barack Obama would win the Iowa caucus by a significant margin. She gave Trump a margin of victory in 2016 and 2020 in the state that lined up relatively closely with the final results.
