The Daily Signal By Preston Brashers
Donald Trump last week won every battleground state and cruised to an electoral victory. “Top” data experts and pollsters didn’t see it coming.
Trump’s big win should serve as a lesson for those who blindly trust the “experts,” whether pollsters or government bureaucrats who wield control over the budget and the economy.
The worst 2024 high-profile polling miss—by 16 points—came from the pollster who the media establishment put on the highest pedestal, Ann Selzer, whose 2012 polling for The Des Moines Register famously foreshadowed Barack Obama’s upset of Mitt Romney in Iowa.
Politico and others referred to Selzer’s polling as the “gold standard.” Clare Malone of ABC News’ FiveThirtyEight wrote a particularly gushing feature on Selzer in 2016, saying:
When Homer wrote of his hero Odysseus, he was ‘that godlike man.’ The D.C. poets use the same laudatory epithet-style when they sing of Selzer; she is uniformly ‘the great’ or ‘most respected’ or, as I saw on a book jacket recently while walking through the Des Moines airport, ‘Iowa’s polling queen.’
When Selzer’s Nov. 2 poll, released three days before the election, showed Kamala Harris winning the safe Trump state of Iowa by three percentage points, Harris supporters who follow polling were exuberant, ready to pop the champagne. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said, “If anybody is accurate, it’s likely to be Ann Selzer.”
If the “best pollster in the business” had Harris winning Iowa, surely she’d win in a rout.
But Iowa voters didn’t get the memo.
Iowans showed up for Trump en masse, giving the former president a 13-point win, the biggest margin for a Republican since Richard Nixon over George McGovern in 1972…
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