US election 2024: What does Selzer’s Iowa poll say and why is it so shocking?

With the US presidential election just days away, a surprising new poll carried out by pollster J Ann Selzer for The Des Moines Register has suggested the state of Iowa could go to Democrat and current vice president Kamala Harris instead of Donald Trump.

Harris leads over Trump by 47 per cent to 44 per cent in the poll of 808 likely voters in the state – a gap which is within its margin of error of 3.4 percentage points – with older and politically independent women being behind the shift towards the Democratic candidate.

Selzer told The Des Moines Register: “Age and gender are the two most dynamic factors that are explaining these numbers.”

And of course, gender has played a pretty big part in this election campaign in relation to abortion rights, with Harris pledging to restore the federal right to abortion lost with the overturning of Roe v Wade, and Trump celebrating the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision which left it to individual US states to decide their abortion policy.

But why has such an outcome shocked Democrats and Republicans alike?

First of all, neither Harris nor Trump have campaigned in Iowa up until this point, focusing more on seven battleground states where the 93 total electoral college votes can help push a candidate over the line and secure the minimum of 270 votes to win.

These key states are Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona.

And secondly, Iowa has leant more towards the Republican Party in recent elections, backing Trump in both 2016 and 2020.

As Americans digest the poll and what it could mean for next week’s election, many social media users have noted just how much of a key issue abortion appears to be in the state:

Meanwhile, Republicans have been urging caution around the data:

It was only back in September that Trump was said to be in the lead in Iowa, with 47 percentage points compared to Harris’s 43 per cent.

Crikey.

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