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D-Day minus 1: What hath Dobbs wrought


Well, I know everyone reading this blog knows about what happened Saturday towards the end of the day. 

The final Des Moines Register / Selzer poll of the election season dropped. In 2020, the poll showed Donald Trump with an 8-point lead over Joe Biden in Iowa, and Trump won by about that margin. This weekend, the poll dropped, and it showed Vice President Kamala Harris with a 3-point lead.

The effect was an earthquake.

Going back to 2008, Ann Selzer has correctly predicted the Iowa vote, with one exception. She is called the "gold standard" for a reason. Emerson also had a poll released at the same time, showing Trump with an expected 10-point lead. But that's Emerson. It's not Selzer. Ms. Selzer has a track record few can match. So when she says that Vice President Harris has a lead in Iowa, it sets off all sorts of alarm bells.

Trump, of course, immediately attacked her, saying that she was "anti-Trump". Did he say the same in 2020, or in 2016, when her poll showing Trump smashing Hillary Clinton in the state presaged her weakness in the Rust Belt and Midwest? It just shows Trump's general stupidity and childishly Manichaean view of the world. Any bad news for him is a result of a hateful conspiracy. It's impossible for it to be rooted in observable fact or statistical analysis.

And to what does Selzer attribute this shift away from Trump? The Supreme Court's Dobbs ruling which removed a national right to abortion:
For two years, pollsters like Nate Cohn and Harry Enten have told us that Dobbs didn't matter, that women would vote in fascism in order to have cheap eggs. What Selzer has shown is that is a pile of hogwash. Women—especially older women, who remember pre-Roe days—are not interested in trading bodily autonomy for whatever economic benefit they think they can reap from a second Trump term. Human beings are not, at heart, economic creatures. Things of much more existential import matter to a far greater extent. 

The Selzer poll puts paid to the idea that the majority of Americans are louche materialists, concerned only with the prices of goods. They will vote for their rights, not for $2 gasoline. (Your mileage may vary, white men are still morons.) What this poll shows is that even in a Republican state like Iowa, there is a limit as to how much a population will tolerate insofar as the erosion of rights goes.

Of course, there is an economic aspect to the poll results. Trump's promise to place ruinous tariffs on all imports awakens fear of a disastrous trade war and inflation. And who monitors these things with hawk eyes? Farmers. Trump's tariffs against China have ruined hundreds of small Iowa farmers. They've heard this song before, and the chords lead to penury.

Will Mrs. Harris win Iowa? It's hard to say. As we know, polling is broken. But it's broken due to actors like Nate Cohn purposely massaging the numbers when they look too good for Democrats, thinking there is an untapped well of Trump voters who will come to his rescue. Selzer has never shown that she operates from that premise. Her goal is to give an accurate snapshot of her state's electorate, not to fit some predetermined conclusion. So, why we should be skeptical of polling, some are more equal than others.

Tomorrow we find out if Kamala Harris will be our next president. The events of the past two weeks, punctuated by the Selzer poll, make me more than confident. Let's go.
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