New Iowa poll shows Harris ahead by 3 points in the Hawkeye State
The final stretch in the race to the White House
The 2024 presidential contest speeds into its final weekend with Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump locked in a razor-thin contest. At this late stage in the campaign, every day matters. And while few voters might change their minds this late in a typical election, there is a sense that what happens in these final days could shift votes. LiveNOW from FOX host Jeane Franseen spoke to political journalist Rich Rubino on the latest.
A shocking new Iowa poll shows Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump by 3 points in the Hawkeye State.
The Des Moines Register-sponsored poll of Iowa was released Saturday, three days before the Nov. 5 election. It was done by J. Ann Selzer, the "gold standard" pollster in Iowa, according to Axios.
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The poll is an outlier – an Emerson poll released Saturday showed Trump ahead by 10 points in Iowa – but it does hint that there could be some surprises come Tuesday. Selzer is known for past polls that accurately predicted Trump's 8-point lead in Iowa over Joe Biden in 2020 and his comfortable victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump (Getty Images)
One big takeaway: The poll shows Harris with a 20 percentage point lead over Trump among women, and she's cut his lead among men by half since September. Overall, the poll shifted seven points away from Trump to Harris since September.
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The poll was conducted Oct. 28-31 among 808 likely Iowa voters. That was after Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, when several of Trump’s allies made racially charged remarks targeting Harris and key voter groups.
"It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming," Seltzer told The Des Moines Register on Saturday. "She has clearly leaped into a leading position."
Iowa had long been a battleground state for presidential candidates: it had the narrowest presidential vote margins in the 2000 and 2004 elections, when it voted for Democrat Al Gore and then for Republican George W. Bush.
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With Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris locked in a dead heat in the race for the White House, political forecasters will be eyeing a clutch of counties across the country for clues on who has the edge once polls start to close on Tuesday evening. Matthew Lebo, professor for the Department of Political Science at University of Western Ontario, joined LiveNOW from FOX's Josh Breslow to discuss.
Barack Obama was the last Democrat to win the state in 2008 and 2012, and changes in the state’s political leanings since then were thought to have pushed Iowa further out of reach for Democrats.
The GOP holds all of Iowa’s congressional seats, the governorship, most statewide offices and lopsided majorities in the state Legislature. Trump won Iowa by comfortable margins in 2016 and 2020. This year, neither candidate nor their running mates have visited Iowa since becoming their parties’ nominees.
Iowa has six electoral votes.