TOI correspondent from Washington: Iowa, a non-battleground state name after a Native American tribe that means “sleepy ones” has jolted the 2024 Presidential elections. Shock results in a well-regarded poll shows Kamala Harris beating Donald Trump 47-44 — which is within the margin of error — in the first sign that she is being competitive even in the American heartland, which is largely Trump territory.
Trump won Iowa in 2020 and 2016, and he was considered so far ahead (by 5+) that both sides did not bother to mount a campaign there, as in the case with 42 other states that go one way or the other by +5, leaving just seven states in play. But a poll by the latest Des Moines Register-Mediacom three days before the election shows Harris wiping out Trump’s 18 point lead (when Biden was his opponent) and surging ahead.
The poll was conducted by Selzer & Co., a firm helmed by well-regarded pollster Ann Selzer, who has a fine track record of accurate polling. “It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming. She has clearly leaped into a leading position,” Selzer told the local Des Moines Registered, which ran the poll with a banner headline “New Candidate New Ballgame.”
Iowa has only six electoral votes, but the repercussions of the poll, if accurate, run far beyond into other midwestern states where Trump is either winning (Nebraska, Kansas, Ohio, Missouri) or in a close fight (Wisconsin, Michigan). The biggest takeaway from the Selzer poll is that women are going for Harris in a big way — probably far bigger than previous nationwide surveys show (+11). In Iowa, independent women are backing Harris by a 28-point margin, and senior women (65+) support her over Trump by a more than 2-to-1 margin, 63% to 28%.
“This is a stunning poll. But Ann Seltzer has as stellar a record as any pollster of forecasting election outcomes in her state.
Women are powering this surge. Portents for the country??” wondered David Axelrod, a political consultant and former aide to Barack Obama, even as Democrats exulted over the poll.
The sharp uptick in female support for Kamala Harris appears to be driven not just by Trump engineering restrictions on women’s reproductive rights through the Supreme Court, but also his vicious attacks on women, often denigrating them as dumb, stupid, and low IQ when challenged.
Some of the trolling and disparaging by his supporters has been lurid. At a rally in North Carolina on Sunday, Trump on his familiar rant about Harris not having worked at McDonald’s when a supported in the crowd appeared to yell “She worked on a corner!” suggesting she was a hooker. “Just remember it’s other people saying it, it’s not me,” Trump responded.
It was a tawdry departure from the grace that John McCain, the 2008 Republican candidate showed when one of his followers disparaged Obama saying he is an Arab and cannot be trusted, and McCain instantly corrected her saying, “No maam, he is a decent family man, a US citizen, and I just happen to have political differences with him.”
Trump has also offended many women with gratuitous comments on reproductive rights, including his latest boast — “I consider myself to be the father of fertilization.”