Iowa pollster Ann Selzer addressed criticisms and what might have gone wrong with the results of her infamous poll during an interview on Friday, which found Vice President Kamala Harris leading President-elect Donald Trump in Iowa, a historically red state, by three points.
“I’m not here to break any news. If you were hoping that I had landed on exactly why things went wrong, I have not. It does sort of awaken me in the middle of the night and I think, well maybe I should check this, this is something that would be very odd if it were to happen. But we’ve explored everything. The Des Moines Register in an unprecedented move for transparency has put online our cross tabs, our waiting system and my analysis and that I’ve not needed to update because it was pretty complete. We don’t know. Do I wish I knew? Yes, I wish I knew,” Selzer said during a discussion at the Iowa Press alongside moderator Kay Henderson, The Gazette’s Des Moines Bureau chief Erin Murphy, and Iowa Public Radio’s Katarina Sostaric.
Trump ended up beating Harris in Iowa by over 10 percentage points. Selzer’s poll was hyped up by the media ahead of the election, as her polling predictions in previous elections have been historically accurate.
Murphy asked Selzer to address some of the backlash she had received about the results of the poll.
“Let’s deal with the allegations because I am mystified about what the motivation anybody thinks I had and would act on in such a public poll. I don’t understand it. And the allegations I take very seriously. They’re saying that this was election interference, which is a crime. So, the idea that I intentionally set up to deliver this response, when I’ve never done that before, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to do it, it’s not my ethic,” Selzer said.
“But to suggest without a single shred of evidence that I was in cahoots with somebody, I was being paid by somebody, it’s all just kind of, it’s hard to pay too much attention to it except that they are accusing me of a crime,” she added.
Selzer wrote in an op-ed for the Des Moines Register about how she had been getting bombarded with criticism and questions. In response, she mused whether her poll itself may have shifted the state for Trump.
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“In response to a critique that I ‘manipulated’ the data, or had been paid (by some anonymous source, presumably on the Democratic side), or that I was exercising psyops or some sort of voter suppression: I told more than one news outlet that the findings from this last poll could actually energize and activate Republican voters who thought they would likely coast to victory. Maybe that’s what happened.”
She also announced that she would be moving on to “other ventures” after the election.
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Fox News’ Lindsay Kornick contributed to this report.
