The final Des Moines Register poll tends to be a newsmaker if not bellwether in the first in the nation primary, but this presidential election cycle has it making news not only for its stunning result saying Vice President Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump by 3 points, but for its being denounced as an "outlier" by Trump campaign pollsters.
"It's hard for anybody to say they saw this coming," Selzer & Co. pollster J. Ann Selzer said, announcing the poll that had Harris flipping an 18-point Trump lead over President Joe Biden in June and a 4-point lead in September to a 3-point lead for Harris — albeit inside the 3.4 percentage point margin of error. "She [Kamala Harris] has clearly leaped into a leading position."
The Trump campaign not only did not see it coming, but it is rejecting it as a representation of fact.
Not only is this an Iowa poll within the margin of error that will not decide the election like the battleground states, but the Trump campaign is denouncing the result as an "outlier" compared to the "stable Emerson College survey of Iowa."
"Des Moines Register is a clear outlier poll," a Trump campaign memo Saturday from pollster Tony Fabrizio and data scientist Tim Saler read. "Emerson College, released today, far more closely reflects the state of the actual Iowa electorate and does so with far more transparency in their methodology."
Emerson College had Trump with a 10-point lead on Harris in the state, a result that more closely tracks historical numbers in the traditionally red state of Iowa, the Trump campaign memo noted, pointing to the Des Moines register obscuring potential partisan bias in the poll.
"Unlike Emerson which transparently reports its share of partisans and the 2020 vote recall, Des Moines Register does NOT disclose the distribution of this information, even though they asked it in their survey," the one-page campaign memo concluded.
"To their credit, the Emerson College poll has an R+4 party split (below 2020 exit polls at R+10), and a Trump +8 recalled 2020 vote margin that aligns with reported returns."
Among the top-line Trump campaign pollsters data points reviewed as telling a more accurate story in the state of Iowa:
- Registered Republican early voting is up 6.4 percentage points from 2020 (plus around 133,000 votes).
- Registered Democrat absentee and early voting was plus-13 points in 2020 (121,602 voters), but it is a virtual dead heat with a mere 20-voter deficit in 2024.
- Des Moines register data has Harris leading seniors (age 65 and over) by 19 points, despite Trump carrying them by 10 points in 2020 CNN exit polls — data that aligns with the latest Emerson College poll.
- Des Moines register has Harris with a 20-point lead among women (56%-36%), but the Emerson College poll showed Trump leading by 5 points and the 2020 CNN exit polls had Trump tied with Biden in that demographic.
Finally, and perhaps more notably, Iowa in the RealClearPolitics polling average shows the state as reliably red, despite the Des Moines Register 11th-hour poll result. Trump beat Biden by 8.2 points in 2020 and Hillary Clinton by 9.5 points in 2016.
The Des Moines register polled 808 likely Iowa voters Oct. 28-31, and the results have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. The Emerson College Polling/RealClearDefense survey polled 800 likely Iowa voters Nov. 1-2 and the results also have margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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