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Somebody's definitely going to have egg on their face after this. Selzer has a long track record of proving her critics wrong over and over, and most of the rest of the polling industry has been herding more than at a sheep farm in the Scottish highlands.. There's a good chance polling firms have been cooking the results in favor of Trump, in a desperate attempt not to underestimate him for a third time in a row. Even if the result in Iowa is at the extreme end of Selzer's MoE and Trump wins the state by a point or two, that likely bodes ill for his chances elsewhere. Trump's best hope in this case would be that Iowa just really, really likes black people (it voted for Obama twice).
On the other hand, if Trump wins Iowa by 5-10 points as previously expected, then it will be a rare black-eye for Selzer. I really wouldn't want to bet against Selzer given her track record, but 1 in 20 polls will go outside the MoE even if everything is calibrated correctly.
It'll be interesting to watch no matter what happens.
Her track record looks impressive until you pull back the curtain a bit. She got many primaries wrong. Her final polls differed from polls a month prior in strong ways.
Also there is a bit of survival bias here. Stock pickers that survive may not be that much better; could just be a random walk.
Please provide links.
She's been high-profile since at least 2008. 16 years of bucking conventional wisdom is a lot of record to just dismiss as "random walk".
16 years sounds like a lot. In reality you are talking about four presidential elections. Also not nearly all of that was “bucking conventional wisdom.”
Keep in mind the claim re random walk in stock pickers is frequently much larger compared to Selzer.
In 2020 in the penultimate poll she had the race in Iowa tied between Trump and Biden tied. Is it possible the electorate moved by 8 points? Sure but not likely.
She also in for example had the Iowa 2016 primary going for Trump.
She also does midterms and a bunch of other stuff, and I'm pretty sure she started in the 90s sometime and only became well-known in 2008 after a few runs having relatively robust results. You can cherrypick anything she's gotten wrong, but she has one of the best track records of any pollster bar none. It's clear that some around here are only questioning her because they don't like the result she's getting, rather than for any relative inaccuracy.
No we are questioning her because the poll doesn’t make sense for all the reasons given.
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My best argument for Trump given this poll:
The poll itself is likely an outlier, and Trump is winning Iowa by low single digits. This might seem to bode badly for swing states. But Trump's power is motivating low propensity voters to come to the polls, and he's spent essentially no effort on doing so in Iowa. In WI, MI, and PA, on the other hand, he is effectively bringing out his broader base, making them much more competitive than you'd infer from this poll. And in other swing states, his path to victory relies on a different coalition, so you can't project IA's results to them. Additionally, Iowa had a six week state-level ban on abortion, which is a state-specific effect that doesn't carry over to other states.
I can buy this argument, but if I were Trump's campaign, I wouldn't be especially happy making it.
It's a pretty mediocre argument for Trump. Polls already try to correct for propensity for voting (read up on "registered voters" vs "likely voters"), and if anyone is doing this correctly, Selzer would. Certainly fewer campaign events on both sides have been held in Iowa, but Trump has always had a relatively poor get-out-the-vote operation, and races have become so nationalized that it's unlikely for local conditions to be particularly anomalous relative to their demographics. It's banking a lot on Trump's rallies having large local effects, when there's not a lot of evidence for that.
The abortion point could be relevant, though, I'll grant you that.
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