J. Ann Selzer is retiring from election polling just weeks after her once-respected poll showed that Kamala Harris was leading in Iowa — only for Trump to win the state by more than 13 percentage points on Election Day.
The much-mocked Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll, released the Saturday before Election Day, erroneously projected Vice President Kamala Harris 3 points ahead of President-elect Donald Trump in the race for Iowa’s six electoral votes.
That was a 7-point shift toward Harris from the same survey a month prior, and 16 points off the real election result.
The poll sent shockwaves across the country, sparking hope among Democrats that Harris had a chance to win a state that Trump carried effortlessly in 2016 and 2020.
Once considered a swing state, Iowa is now reliably red, and hasn’t voted for a Democrat in a presidential contest since reelecting Barack Obama in 2012.
In a guest op-ed for The Des Moines Register, the veteran Iowa pollster claimed her departure has been in the works for over a year, and plans to transition “to other ventures and opportunities.”
“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.
Still, the timing of this transition raised some eyebrows on X, where Selzer doubled down that her departure wasn’t due to her imprecise Iowa poll.
“Oh, and mentions of ‘retirement’ are inaccurate. It’s been a long-time plan that this election would be my last work of this sort. Other work continues,” she tweeted.
Selzer, who heads up the polling and public affairs firm Selzer & Co., has been conducting the Des Moines Register’s Iowa poll since 1987.
The same morning she announced her retirement, she released a document on X disclosing her post-mortem evaluation of the erroneous Iowa poll — which came up short on explaining what went wrong.
“Since election night, I’ve worked my way through possible explanations for the dramatic difference between the final Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll that my company conducted,” Selzer wrote in her report.
“To cut to the chase, I found nothing to illuminate the miss.”
Though she claimed not to find fault in her methodology, Selzer offered a few theories in her report, like respondents lying or shifting their opinions after the survey.
She also posited that her poll failed to pick up the shift among men of color toward Trump, as 84% of the poll’s respondents were white — mirroring the demographics of the state.
Those explanations aren’t cutting it for X users across the platform, who were quick to point out that she seemed to be slinking off the stage after a miss that make national news.
“Thank God I never have to hear the words “gold standard” and Ann Selzer again,” one X user wrote. “A 17% whiff will do that.”
Another excoriated her for hiding in retirement, writing: “Ann Selzer’s retirement makes one thing totally clear. She didn’t catch an outlier. She didn’t make an honest mistake. She cooked the books and released a poll that she knew wasn’t just wrong but dishonest. She knew there would be no consequence in retirement.”
In her column Selzer shrugged off those shots and defended her integrity, but still refused to say she screwed up.
“I’ll continue to be puzzled by the biggest miss of my career,” her report concluded.
