A new poll shows a shock reversal in the state of Iowa, with Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris taking the lead among likely voters just days ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
The Des Moines Register on Saturday published the results of its most recent poll, finding that Harris took a three-point lead with 47 percent of likely voters saying they would choose her if the election were held today versus 44 percent saying they would choose Republican nominee Donald Trump.
This still falls within the poll’s margin of error, which is plus or minus 3.4 percent.
Trump had held a four-point lead in the paper’s previous poll from September and a staggering 18-point lead in a June poll when Trump was facing incumbent President Joe Biden.
The former president won the state in the previous two elections, growing his lead from 51.15 percent in 2016 to 53.09 percent in 2020. The state voted twice for Barack Obama, and it voted for George W. Bush going into his second term after backing Al Gore in the 2000 election.
However, J. Ann Selzer, president of Pollster Selzer & Company, the firm that conducted the poll, said in a release along with the results that she imagines it was “hard for anybody to say they saw this coming.”
Newsweek reached out by email on Saturday evening to the Trump and Harris campaigns for comment.
The poll included independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who dropped out of the race in September and endorsed Trump. Kennedy tried to have his name taken off ballots, but he failed to get his name off the Iowa ballot.
He kept his name on ballots in non-battleground states, such as New York, and encouraged voters to back him in those states.
Kennedy picked up three percent of the responses in the Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll, making up the difference between Harris and Trump.
The additional points went to other candidates, with fewer than one percent backing Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver and one percent saying they would just generally pick someone else.
The pollsters determined that independent voters overall had started to break for Harris, particularly independent women voters, continuing the trend of an increasing gender gap among likely voters.
The poll found women voters backing Harris by 56 percent to Trump’s 36 percent. Male voters showed a similar but inverse pattern, favoring Trump by 52 percent to Harris’ 38 percent.
The Selzer & Co. survey included 808 likely Iowa voters, both those who had already cast ballots and those who said they would definitely vote. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
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