The New Yorker:

By Clare Malone

On Saturday evening, the politically on-edge of America, who, in the final days of the election, are nourished by any new scraps of data about the potential makeup of the electorate, were fed an unexpected morsel. The pollster Ann Selzer’s final survey of the state of Iowa showed Kamala Harris beating Donald Trump, forty-seven per cent to forty-four per cent. It was a stunning result; in 2020, Trump won the state by more than eight points, with fifty-three per cent of the vote.

Selzer is something of an institution in Beltway circles, a pollster known for her long record of accuracy and her willingness to publish outlier polls that go against the prevailing narrative. Pollsters tend to “herd” when they’re nervous that their results might be wrong, fiddling with variables to come up with something that looks more like what everyone else is predicting. Selzer’s latest poll did anything but that. Based on her years of work, the data journalist Nate Silver has given Selzer & Company an A+ rating.

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