🕒 Last update: 8 p.m., Saturday, November 2. As you’ve probably heard if you follow polling closely, Ann Selzer — our highest-rated pollster — just came out with a survey showing Kamala Harris leading by 3 points in Iowa! Before you get your hopes up too much, another Iowa poll today from Emerson College had Trump ahead by 9 points instead. Still, Harris’s chances in Iowa roughly doubled from 9 percent to 17 percent.
However, the poll had little effect on our topline Electoral College numbers because Iowa has only a 1 percent chance of being the tipping-point state. In the world where Harris wins Iowa, she is probably also cleaning up elsewhere in the Midwest, particularly in Michigan and Wisconsin, in which case she’s already almost certain to win the Electoral College. So most of the time, it would be redundant.
Still, to have a prominent, high-quality pollster like this at a time when most other pollsters are herding toward the consensus suggests the possibility that other pollsters could be lowballing Harris. We’ll have a special edition Model Talk out later tonight with more.
