Overtime, I’ve become convinced that within the past month, published polling averages have been tainted with a flood of additional right-leaning polling survey results, skewering the polling averages to paint the picture that the GOP MAGA ex-president is tied with the democrat candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris in the race to the White House.
I along with experts in the polling industry have been waiting for the Iowan non-biased, gold standard polling data to be published by J. Ann Selzer just before the November 5th presidential election date. The results are in, and Vice President Kamala Harris is in the lead by 3 points over Trump with women voters making the difference in a red state by 28 points over men, and where the democratic party has not invested monies or effort. This VP Harris lead was driven by women, particularly those who are over 65 years old. Independent women selected VP Harris over the GOP MAGA ex-president 57 percent to 29 percent, which was up from September, when they gave her only a five. This is proving to be an organic movement.
Nate Silver wrote, on his blog Silver Bulletin“[Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co.] has a long history of bucking the conventional wisdom and being right. “In a world where most pollsters have a lot of egg on their faces, she has near-oracular status.”
The Cook Report, which offers nonpartisan analysis, had rated Iowa as “solid Republican” on its rating scale, meaning the presidential race in the state was not considered competitive and was not likely to become closely contested.
History:
In February 2024, Ms. Selzer found Trump ahead of Biden by 48 percent to 33 percent in Iowa.
Here are J. Ann Selzer’s numbers from June 2024 (Trump 50 percent, President Joe Biden 32 percent in Iowa).
But in the September 2024 poll, Ms. Selzer published polling results showed a significant change in the Democrat party numbers. The democrat party’s presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris had managed to consolidate the Democrat party’s base, to edge up from POTUS Joe Biden’s 18-point lag in June to closing the gap to within 4 points of the GOP MAGA ex-president in Iowa. Ms. Selzer noted that “The race has tightened significantly.” For me, this was the “canary in the coal mine” sign.
On November 2nd, Liam Halawith of the dailyiowan.com reported that J. Ann Selzer’s polling data was released to the press. “The nationally recognized Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll found that Vice President Kamala Harris leads former President Donald Trump by three percentage points among likely voters in its final poll before the Nov. 5 election, within the poll’s margin of error.”
“Harris is leading with 47 percent and Trump with 44, showing massive momentum for Harris in the deep-red state after her predecessor President Joe Biden was trailing Trump by 18 points in a June edition of the poll.”
“The poll results come just days before a high-stakes election where key battleground states are in a dead heat and nationally Harris leads by a small margin. ”
“Despite not campaigning in the state as the candidates and their surrogates focus exclusively on seven key battleground states, a Harris win in the state would be surprising considering Iowa’s swing to the right since 2016.”
“Formerly considered a swing state because of its large independent voting block — which makes up about a third of the electorate — Harris’ surge is largely due to support from women in the state, with whom she has a 28-point lead over Trump.”
“The poll, conducted by Ann Selzer the president of Selzer & Co., is famously accurate having predicted Trump’s wins in the state in 2016 and 2020, and Obama’s victory in the state in 2012 and 2008 all within a percentage point.”
“The poll surveyed 808 likely Iowa voters with a margin of error of 3.4 percent.”
Don’t do the “happy dance” yet, but this polling data by Ann Selzer is great news that should make the voters take a more skeptical view at the other polling companies’ published data.
With the flood of disinformation permeating websites during recent US election cycles, when the democrat Vice President Kamala Harris becomes the 47th US president, she should add to her to-do list the project of ending the flux of disinformation propaganda without check permeating social media websites during election seasons. Currently, there’s only one non-governmental entity working on this issue.
As per the November 1, 2024 New York Times report by Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson, “This Group Refuses to Stop Tracking Disinformation:”
“Though a larger coalition of fact checkers has disbanded, a team of students and researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle is still working to document how lies online threaten to undermine this year’s presidential race.”
“The fate of the broader Election Integrity Partnership reflects how politically fraught the fight over disinformation has become — and why the baseless claims about 2020 have resurfaced once again in this year’s race, despite having never been substantiated in numerous court challenges and investigations.”
“The original goal of the group, (Center for an Informed Public) conceived by college interns at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in Washington, was to flag election lies online in a portal shared with government officials and teams at the major social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter.”
(Stanford and other partners including the National Conference on Citizenship, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and Graphika, a social media analytics firm disbanded because of political pressures.)
“The platforms themselves, especially X under Elon Musk, also slashed efforts to moderate political content and also restricted public access to data that allowed researchers to analyze posts on the platforms.”
“The resources and the people that used to be so prominent and focused on public education in this field have been scattered to the wind,” said Joan Donovan, an assistant professor at Boston University and founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute.”
“One of the most prominent figures was Renée DiResta, the former research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. In an interview, she said that disrupting the work of debunking disinformation was precisely the point of a coordinated political and legal campaign. She has parted ways.”
“In this election cycle, the center at the University of Washington has stepped into the gap, while trying to inoculate its student and doctoral researchers from the politics that swarmed the previous effort.”
“The center has recruited teams of undergraduates to do the work that the students at Stanford did four years ago, though not enough to work around the clock. In July, it hired a new manager, Danielle Lee Tomson, whose doctoral thesis examined the ethnography of social media influencers. The teams work in two shifts a day, using commercially available tools to search a bottomless internet for emergent rumors.”
“Ms. Tomson emphasized that the team’s mission was not to check facts or disprove the narratives, but rather to track how they emerge and spread, pointing out context and trustworthy sources of information. The center has published dozens of analyses on its website and on the newsletter platform Substack.”
“In the case of the false rumor about the Pentagon changing its rules about the use of force against citizens, the center wrote that the conspiratorial narratives exploited a data void — “a situation where there is no reliable information about a topic.”
“The Pentagon did issue a new directive in September, but it didn’t change policy. In fact the directive was a bureaucratic step to clarify the limits on the use of the military against civilians. From the first conspiratorial post about it on Oct. 5, the false narrative — that it was done in preparation to put down protests over the election — simmered for 11 days until it was picked up by the Hodge twins, two brothers with millions of followers on YouTube and X. The rumor went viral.”
“After the center highlighted the post, the Pentagon took the unusual step last week of issuing a statement, refuting the “rumors and rhetoric circulating on social media.” Other universities, companies and research organizations remain committed to fact-checking and documenting disinformation, including PolitiFact and NewsGuard, but experts warn that more is needed.”
See: Right-wing groups are organizing on Telegram ahead of Election Day (New York Times)
This post was updated on 11/5/2024.
Gronda Morin 