J. Ann Selzer, Public Opinion Pollster

Kay Henderson: The latest Iowa poll tells us what voters think about certain politicians and policy issues. We'll discuss the results with trusted and respected pollster Ann Selzer. On this edition of Iowa Press.

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Announcer: For decades, Iowa Press has brought you political leaders and newsmakers from across Iowa and beyond. Celebrating more than 50 years on statewide Iowa PBS, this is the Friday, September 27th edition of Iowa Press. Here is Kay Henderson.

Kay Henderson: Our guest today has a doctorate in communications theory and research. She's been on this program before. She has led the Iowa Poll at the Des Moines Register since 1987. In 1996, she launched her own firm, Selzer and Company, which does polling nationally and of course, in Iowa. Welcome back, J. Ann Selzer to Iowa Press.

J. Ann Selzer: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be back.

Kay Henderson: Also joining our conversation today, Dave Price of the Gray Television stations in Iowa. And Erin Murphy of The Gazette in Cedar Rapids.

Erin Murphy: Ann, in your poll, in a span of three months, we went from Donald Trump with an 18 point lead over Joe Biden to Donald Trump with a four point lead over Kamala Harris. How did that happen?

J. Ann Selzer: How did it happen? Well, you have to first recognize, as you would, what a shock that poll was, because Iowa has been so strong for Donald Trump since he burst onto the scene. So my job as the pollster was to go dig deep into the data and see if we could figure that out. And I have two things to say about it. First, it wasn't that there were people who were converted, necessarily. In fact, Donald Trump held the same number of likely voters in our September poll as he did in June. There were just more people who identified as likely voters in our September poll. And those went predominantly for Vice President Harris. So we had more likely voters. This is my second point. But they weren't uniform across all demographics. They were more commonly women, younger, college educated, suburban, all demographics that tilt toward Kamala Harris.

Erin Murphy: Yeah. So the that was what I wanted to get to you it's I saw that too, the boost in the people who were suddenly more likely to vote were, as you said, demographics more likely to vote for Kamala Harris.

J. Ann Selzer: So my point being that this is an election not about trying to lure away people from Donald Trump. If you're trying if you're the challenger, it's going to be more about turnout. And you hear people say that all the time. But this poll is a rare moment of clarity about why that's important.

Erin Murphy: Yeah. I'm curious to get your perspective on, I'm a little more online than I should be, for my own mental health. But in doing so, a lot of the conversation when this poll came out that I saw was especially from the Republican conservative side. Well, but if you look at past Iowa Polls early on in the race, like at this point, there were polls that were a little more favorable for, for example, Fred Hubbell, the Democratic candidate for governor in 2018, or Joe Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in that those polls, Iowa Polls eventually moved towards Donald Trump as the election got closer, or Kim Reynolds. Is that a fair analysis? A fair way to view? I'm just curious your perspective on that discussion.

J. Ann Selzer: My perspective on that is that it's not that something changes in the poll. It's something changes in the electorate. So if there's a change in who is identifying themselves as a definite voter, that's our definition of a likely voter. If something is changing in real life, then we're going to catch it in our poll. And an example of how we catch is the June poll. If you remember, June like 100 years ago. And it was there was such a malaise and we had an electorate that was not optimistic. And they were dreading the election and they weren't enthusiastic or excited. And in this poll, we asked that same battery of questions and you see a pop in optimism and enthusiasm. So that's a change in the electorate. And our poll is designed that that will be revealed to us.

Erin Murphy: Yeah. So is there, and I don't want to, I want to make this as little of a crystal ball question as possible. So let me ask, is there from what you see in this poll, is there room for a similar movement in the next few months in this race? How much could these numbers still change in one direction or the other?

J. Ann Selzer:

Well, you may be aware I have a crystal ball collection, but I don't use it for polling. So what I would say is there room? There's room for anything to happen. What we've lived through in the last couple of months, spectacular changes in things that would affect the way the electorate is thinking.

Dave Price: I'd like to talk about the haters before we get into more of these numbers. Okay. there are some, particularly on the right, who looked at these numbers and say, of course, these numbers are like this. She loves Kamala Harris. This is associated with the Des Moines Register. They are left leaning. It's biased the way she puts these questions together. So before we dig more into the nitty gritty of this, will you address the haters and kind of open the curtain here about how you put these things together? Does it matter who your partner is on a project?

J. Ann Selzer: It does not matter who my partner is on a project. You know what? We...our goal is to take our best shot at revealing through our poll what's true. So you talk to a small number of people. You want it to represent a real universe of voters in Iowa. So the methods are the same no matter. And it's, you know, fortunately, maybe those don't show up in my online inbox, but they're balanced out by people who think for, I guess I'm proud of it, that my poll has integrity. So we've shown Donald Trump with big leads and we've shown Donald Trump with smaller leads. We've shown Democrats who everybody thought was going to win. And our poll said, no, not so fast. So I don't care what my client wishes for or hopes for in the privacy of their office. I want my poll to be my best shot at what's true.

Dave Price: Okay. Let's talk about let's talk about a surge here. So I was thinking kind of historically with you and what your polls have shown back in the day with Obama, a different day with Rick Santorum. But these are kind of a different period of time than we're talking about with Kamala Harris, who's talking kind of late summer with her. And I was trying to remember, if you all picked up John Edwards at the end in ‘04 as well.

J. Ann Selzer: Picked him up as if the campaign had been a week longer.

Dave Price: That's what I was thinking.

J. Ann Selzer: Okay, he might have won, yes.

Dave Price: And so the three examples I used were all kind of late campaign surges. Harris is earlier. Can you glean anything from similarities in the feel of a surge here?

J. Ann Selzer:

This campaign is unsimilar, dissimilar to any other campaign. So she you know was catapulted into the nomination and her campaign is running on all cylinders. So things were happening very quickly. Is it a surge that will, you know, have high tide and then ebb? We'll wait and see. I mean, that's the exciting part of all of this. Anything could happen and probably will.

Dave Price: Okay.

Kay Henderson: Something's happened with Robert F Kennedy Jr. He said he's suspending his campaign. And that announcement came before you started your polling. Your poll showed he had 6% support. What can you tell us about those people who are still intent on voting for him at this point?

J. Ann Selzer: Well, they're still 6%. And that's not a small number. There is more of them than there are people who say they're not sure who they're going to vote for. His support has dropped by half of what we had seen for him. I think that's right. before and so you take a look, you try to define well, do those people give an advantage toward either of the main two candidates? His name will be on the ballot in Iowa, so we were right to include him in our list. But they come, his support comes about evenly from people who voted for Joe Biden and for Donald Trump in 2020. And a big part of it comes, a bigger part comes from people who didn't vote in that election. So that probably skews young too.

Kay Henderson: Back in the old days, we'd even see a poll in October that had a number of people who said they weren't sure who they would support. This poll showed 1%. What does that tell you about the decisions that these people have made here? I mean, up to the point in September?

J. Ann Selzer: I feel like, the electorate and their candidates, it's become a stickier relationship. So once they're there, they're there. We do ask a question that is. Well, could you still change your mind? And that's about one out of five Iowans who choose a first choice candidate and who say they're still open to changing their minds, and not much difference between Harris and Trump on that. But it's...in terms of people who just say, I haven't made up my mind. You're right. It's low.

Erin Murphy: That safe to say then this becomes more of a turnout election than a persuasion election?

J. Ann Selzer: Right. As I said, I don't think you're going to go increase Harris's popularity among people who are committed to Donald Trump. But it also kind of says there's a ceiling, perhaps, on Trump, that this poll demonstrates or suggests would support the idea that there is because he didn't. It's not that he lost ground. It's he had the same. We use the term weighted bodies. It's a funny name, but in terms of the number of people in our poll, let's call them respondent equivalents because there's some funny math that goes into that. He actually picked up a few bodies less than 1%. But compared to Joe Biden, Kamala Harris picked up a lot of bodies, about 85 weight weighted respondents. And so it's the influx of people who maybe in June, we're not interviewing the same people. So it's as though they decided, I'm going to get off the bench. I'm going to participate. They moved from saying

they might vote to saying they'll definitely vote and that kind of thing.

Erin Murphy: So many other things that your poll asked about the way we want to get to, you asked two unique questions, similar but unique questions on abortion policy. Could you explain the subtle difference in those two questions? And then, as I understand, one of those results was, was a new high watermark in your poll.

J. Ann Selzer: Right. There's a poll that we've asked repeatedly for the last couple of cycles, about whether you think abortion in Iowa should be all abortion should be legal, most abortions legal, most abortions not legal, and all abortions not legal. And we then add to legal not legal together. And at 64% of all Iowans said they are on the legal side of that segment. And that is a new high. It had been pretty close back in ‘08 which was the first time we asked the question this way. And so now that it's up, it was 48 and now it's 64. So there's been an increasing and especially recently, it has gone up significantly there. The other question was about the Iowa six week, six week abortion ban. And as we had seen when it was still in the legislature, more were opposed to it then were in favor of it. And we repeated similar question wording. There's an uptick in the people saying they're opposed.

Erin Murphy: And just real quick on that, I, I found that interesting because it's two similar questions but different enough in the response rates were just slightly different. So what should we glean from that that there was about a 5% difference there between, the people who say legal or all legal versus opposed the state law?

J. Ann Selzer: Well, I could argue that you would think that the, the six week ban would be even less popular than the portion saying that it should be all or most legal. So there's a little bit of contradiction in the numbers. And maybe some of that is, affection for the governor. And that was her, big deal that such that she brought in a special session of the legislature to get that passed.

Dave Price: Can we talk about the issues a little bit? One of the things that stood out to me was, when you're going head to head, you've got Trump plus four. When you're going on the issues, you had seven issues. It's Trump six out of seven, but with sizable advantages on this. Five out of the six, it's double digit. And the other one was nine. So close enough. Right. What do you take from that? J. Ann Selzer: Well, I'm going to, sort of reveal that I've listened to a lot of focus group qualitative, one on one interviews with real voters and one of every once in a while, something will really stand out. And that was a person who was trying to decide and said, you know, I find Trump disgusting. He disgusts me. Harris scares me, and I'd rather be disgusted than scared. And I thought, okay, so this is it's not Trump's personality that is endearing to him. There are his positions on issues, and that's what our poll would suggest.

Dave Price: Also stepping back from this, and I don't know if you can glean enough from this to answer this, but I'm going to give it a shot. Democrats leaning in heavily to the abortion question, right. Republicans leaning

heavily into kind of money matters, whether it's and if you look at these that that you have on here when you talk about inflation, housing prices, all that stuff, how do we look at these numbers and decide on this scale? Which one is resonating stronger, heavier?

J. Ann Selzer: Why do you have to I don't know that you have to decide. Again. I heard a person say abortion policy is economic policy. There are economic consequences to abortion bans. And that she'd put it together that way. I think the other thing to think about is when people talk about the economy, and by people I mean, candidates or commentators, pundits, they're to me, my ear hears macro economics. I hear the inflation rate. I hear the unemployment rate. I hear what the Dow Jones is doing. And that's not in everyday lives. So they say it's good news that the inflation rate is going down back where it used to be. That doesn't mean prices are going down. Inflation means that prices are rising. So in the everyday life, the micro economic voter they're playing with those terms a little differently.

Dave Price: Looking at the way you did the polling on the House races. So it is not candidate A versus candidate B, it's kind of the brand, the flavor of it. Right. So it's more generic that it's done differently in three of the four Republicans had the advantage there. The first district, the Democrat would have the slight advantage. What do you glean from this when you're kind of talking in these general terms and why is it done this way?

J. Ann Selzer: The reason it's done this way is because our poll is of 800 Iowans. We're going to extract from that who are likely voters. That was 600 and some. And by the time you break that into four congressional districts, all you can really hope for is something directional. How is what's the mood of the electorate?

Dave Price: The sample size then is smaller.

J. Ann Selzer: The sample size is small and therefore less stable. Our final poll will be 800 likely voters. So they'll that'll bring it up to about 200 in each of the districts. but we will want to be able to compare to the previous poll. So we like to repeat the poll the way it was done.

Dave Price: So then now the fourth district pretty lopsided, heavily Republican advantage. What does it tell you as you look at these kind of thematics like this?

J. Ann Selzer: Well that that the fourth district big surprise tilts very republican.

Dave Price: Maybe not that one.

J. Ann Selzer: I think what is interesting to me is what's happening in the first district. And we get less everyday coverage of that here. But that struck me as interesting. People expected the third district to potentially be in play as well. And yet it was the same number as the second district.

Dave Price: We're seeing millions of dollars now flowing into that race because they are also paying attention to those numbers.

J. Ann Selzer: Right. Exactly, exactly.

Kay Henderson: You also asked some question about job approval and favorability. Let's help our viewers. What's the difference?

J. Ann Selzer: Excellent question. Thank you. Thank you for that. I wish some reporters understood it was different. So approval rating is a question we ask about office holders. How are they doing their job. Because how do you think somebody is doing their job, and whether you like them - which is favorability - those don't necessarily correlate. Although there's something there. And favorability we can ask of people who are not current officeholders. So we could ask about Tim Walz and JD Vance because they're not current. they may be office holders, but not in Iowa. Right. So how they do their job is irrelevant to that.

Kay Henderson: One thing that sort of stood out to me is that the favorability rating of Donald Trump, who is not currently president, and Iowa's current governor, Kim Reynolds, were basically the same. What else stood out to you as you looked at the favorability ratings?

J. Ann Selzer: The favorability rating for Donald Trump actually ticked down a few points compared to June. And the favorability rating for Kamala Harris, who was then only the vice president at the time of our June poll, ticked up. One thing we take a look at are people who are, we call the double haters, and that's people who don't are unfavorable toward both of the main candidates. They said they were very or mostly unfavorable to Biden. Same for Trump. We've put them together and then took a look at how they tilted and did it quite a lot of reporting on that. In June. We didn't have enough of those in this poll to really do much. It was 37 again, respondent equivalents, and they tilt toward Harris. But there's a lot that you can if you can really take the time and dig in. Lots can be revealed to you in those two questions.

Dave Price: We do a little pregame gathering before we get in here. And one of the things that came up were national polls. Now, you do have other clients where you do national work. So let's turn the spotlight on the media, perhaps a little bit on this, but do we over play in national polls? We do not elect a president with popular vote, as we know it's Electoral College. And to us it seems like some of the bashing of the polls in previous elections is because people kind of, well, Hillary Clinton was going to win. Well, she got she did

get more votes and the popular vote. Right. Could you address how we as consumers and maybe as reporters should be looking at these national polls and what relevance they have?

J. Ann Selzer: I think the relevance they have is in reflecting the mood of the nation. So while that's not how we elect a president, it does sort of say that the nation is tilting in one direction or another for the consumer. Keep in mind that if California is going for the Democrat by a big number, well, there are a lot of Californians. And if Oklahoma is tilting toward the Republican in a big way, they're just fewer of them. And if you put them into a national poll, California is going to out shout those smaller states that might be going more Republican.

Erin Murphy: You know, if I may tee something up here for you, if I understand right. A reminder is that a poll, especially a national poll, is not a prediction of the election outcome, correct?

J. Ann Selzer: Correct. But I would say none of my polls are predictions either. Anything can happen and probably will.

Erin Murphy: A snapshot in time. Right?

J. Ann Selzer: There you go.

Erin Murphy: So on this kind of topic, what should help folks who are watching, who see polls and care about polls, what would your advice be to an Iowan who consumes news and sees polls and their stories and on the news? You know, how can we be discerning consumers of polling?

J. Ann Selzer: My advice? Good luck. There are so many polls that are out there and so many different methodologies. there's a nice piece in the New York Times sort of trying to take a look at all of the different ways that people are being pulled. I've never been a fan of panels, that is, people who are recruited and say, “Poll me, poll me!” Yeah. And they give them a gift card. And, you know, there's they're sort of their vote is paid for that way. Not a fan because it's very difficult for that kind of small group to reflect the whole electorate. The good luck part is I'm pretty much a methodology archeologist. Like, I dig and dig until I can find it. But even with transparency initiative from the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers, people aren't disclosing how they are identifying likely voters. We put our methodology with every story that the Des Moines Register publishes. It looks very simple on paper, and you'd look at it and say, it can't possibly work. And yet we have a very accurate track record, and may it always be so.

Kay Henderson: Thanks for being a repeat guest. We have talked about this before, but, oddly enough, yesterday I got a text from Emerson asking me to respond to a poll. So explain to people who know people who are younger than us at this table, how are you reaching people who don't answer the phone?

J. Ann Selzer: Well, we only do our interviews by phone, except for private clients. We have some different ways of doing things, but for now, there are enough people who will answer their phone and will show up on your phone as number unknown or unknown caller. that will take a stab at that. The first thing they hear is I'm calling from the Iowa Poll, and our response rate is nothing to brag about given where it used to be, but it's higher than national average in terms of people being willing to talk to us. So I hear it all the time. Well, you've never called me. I said, to your knowledge. And I never answer my phone. And I say, okay, there, there will come a time when my polls cannot be accurate because of this. For now, we couldn't be accurate, if all of the Kay Hendersons said, I'm not going to answer your poll. So for now, there's a doppelganger Kay Henderson, who is just like you but willing to answer their phone. So far.

Erin Murphy: And we have just about 30 seconds left. Along those lines, I'm curious and this may be relevant with the Kamala Harris and the appeal, the boost in younger voters, 18 to 22 year olds who don't answer phone calls from their parents, much less so. I think they're all they're all texting. Are you confident that you're getting enough of the very young people here?

J. Ann Selzer: I'm never confident. I worry all the time, but that's sort of part of my job. And as I said, one day this will blow up, and may it not be this year.

Kay Henderson: Well, we are done with this conversation. We'll have you back to talk about more polling in the future. Thanks for being here today.

J. Ann Selzer: Always a pleasure. Thank you.

Kay Henderson: You may watch every episode of Iowa Press online at IowaPBS.org. For everyone here at Iowa PBS, thanks for watching today.

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