Reply to Harris beating Trump in Iowa

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]A note about Selzer from someone in the business:

Their approach is very old school and based on traditional sampling methods using registered voter rolls and a very intimate familiarity with Iowa. Selzer's polls tend to be very expensive because they are time and labor intensive. And unlike a lot of the other major pollsters, they use a smaller number or survey interviewers which allows tighter control of training and quality assurance. A lot of polling outfits maintain call centers (often staffed by college students -- the cheap labor of students is why so many pollsters are associated with colleges) and will staff way up during election season but there is often high turnover and their interviewers are often inexperienced. Plus they are often polling nationally as well as in multiple states and thus don't have the focus of Selzer's polling (Selzer may sometimes do national polling, which is easier, but they don't poll in any other state than Iowa) and it's harder to control quality.

It is obviously possible that the Selzer poll is an outlier result. In fact if I were making a prediction based on polling in Iowa I would assume Trump would win by 2-3 points and that this Selzer poll represents some late-breaking momentum for Harris but not a total flip of a red state. However even that conservative interpretation of these results is very bad news for Trump. I think it's very hard to dismiss this poll out of hand and just point to the Emerson poll giving him a 10 point lead. Selzer's poll is more transparent (she releases all her data and is very transparent about sampling methodology in a way Emerson is not) and Selzer's familiarity with Iowa (she's been running polls in the state for nearly 40 years) is much better. Even if you assume the "real" result is somewhere in the middle and Trump wins Iowa but by a smaller margin than expected, that's a major shift.[/quote]
Thank you for this informed answer.[/quote]

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