Opinion: Kamala Harris’ Popularity Is Exploding—Will It Last?
The numbers were important because they were so unexpected. Blasted on the front page of the Des Moines Sunday Register, “New Candidates New Ballgame. Trump 47 Harris 43.”
It was a turnaround of nearly miraculous proportion. The same poll, conducted in June with Joe Biden in the race had Donald Trump at 50 and Joe Biden at 32. In the two months she’s been a candidate, Kamala Harris has erased most of Donald Trump’s lead in Iowa. That doesn’t mean the Harris campaign will now be spending money to win the state. It’s nice to be within striking distance but Iowa is a red state with two Republican senators and unlikely to break faith with the GOP.
So why did fellow pollsters and analysts get so excited about the Iowa poll results? It was conducted by J. Ann Selzer, a nationally known pollster who cemented her reputation by being one of the few, maybe even the only one among her peers to recognize Trump’s strength in 2016 when he won and 2020 when he lost to Biden but by a significantly smaller margin than what other name brand pollsters predicted.