The Bombshell Iowa poll shows Harris ahead of Trump in the state where he won twice

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Kamala Harris has outperformed Donald Trump in a new poll in Iowa, a state Trump easily won in 2016 and 2020, according to a bombshell new poll.

Women and older voters are responsible for the remarkable turnaround in the Selzer poll, conducted for the Des Moines Register newspaper and published Saturday.

According to a poll of 808 likely voters surveyed between Oct. 28 and Oct. 31, Harris leads Trump 47%-44% in a state that has leaned heavily Republican in recent years. It is within the margin of error of 3.4 percentage points, but marked a reversal from a September poll in Iowa that had Trump leading by 4 points, the newspaper reported.

“The poll shows that women, particularly older or politically independent, are driving the late shift toward Harris,” the Register said. The two candidates' completely different positions on abortion may have contributed to the respected pollster's unexpected numbers.

Selzer has a history of predicting accurate results in presidential and Senate elections. The following numbers show surveys compared to results from the last 12 years.

Trump won Iowa in his last two presidential campaigns by more than 9 percentage points in 2016 and 8 points in 2020.

“No one can say they foresaw this,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. “She clearly took a leading position.”

“Age and gender are the two most dynamic factors that explain these numbers.”

The Trump campaign released a memo from its chief pollster and chief data adviser calling the Des Moines Register poll “a clear outlier” and saying that an Emerson College poll – also released Saturday – reflects the state of the electorate better reflected in Iowa.

The Emerson College Polling/RealClearDefense poll of a similar number of likely voters on November 1 and 2 came to a completely different conclusion: Trump led Harris by 10 points. This survey also has a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points. According to the Emerson College poll, Trump is well ahead of Harris among men and independents, while Harris is doing well among those under 30.

And Iowa Republican Chairman Jeff Kaufman criticized the survey, the pollster and the newspaper after it was released.”

“The @DMRegister and @jaselzer have simply lost any shred of credibility,” Kaufman tweeted on Saturday.

“This should be classified as spreading propaganda with polls like this. It's sad to see how far they've fallen. President Trump will win Iowa.”

Just hours earlier, Kaufman had tweeted that the Selzer poll would read: “Trump is on track to beat Harris by at least eight points in Iowa so they can protect their reputations heading into Election Day.”

Nationally, Harris and Trump are in a tight race for the White House, with early voting underway well before Election Day on Tuesday.

Whoever wins Iowa will receive six Electoral College votes, 270 of which are needed to capture the White House.

Both parties have focused their efforts on “battleground states” such as North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in the final days of their campaigns.

Reuters contributed to this report