When The Des Moines Register published its shocking poll this weekend, showing Vice President Kamala Harris with a lead of three percentage points over former President Donald J. Trump in reliably red Iowa, the state’s Democrats were among the most surprised people.
Rita Hart, the chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, said the party had not even been asking voters about the presidential campaign as it canvassed neighborhoods searching for support of its candidates in two competitive congressional districts and the State Legislature.
“Since I started as chair a year ago in February, we have known that the top of our ticket is really these congressional races,” Ms. Hart said on Monday. “We’ve been saying for months that these are tossup races. This polling just indicates that we have really been reaching out to these voters and making a difference.”
Earlier in the race, President Biden’s campaign had given Iowa so little attention that the state and county parties did not have Biden yard signs or literature for canvassers to distribute to voters, Ms. Hart said. After Ms. Harris replaced Mr. Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate, the signs and literature eventually arrived, but the local party remained focused on winning its two competitive House districts, which cover the northeastern and southwestern quadrants of the state.
Democrats in Iowa say their voters have been energized by opposition to a six-week abortion ban that took effect this summer after it was passed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.
The Harris campaign has not suddenly changed its calculus about Iowa or other states outside the presidential battlegrounds. No last-minute surrogates are being dispatched to Des Moines or Davenport, in part because it is too late but also because there is no plausible scenario in which flipping Iowa from red to blue alters who wins the Electoral College and becomes president. If Ms. Harris manages to win Iowa, she will almost certainly have carried plenty of other states to clinch the presidency.
But there was plenty of data within The Register’s Iowa poll that amplified optimism in Democratic circles about Ms. Harris’s chances. Iowa Democrats on Monday circulated a Kansas poll published last week by Fort Hays State University that showed Ms. Harris leading by 15 percentage points among voters 65 and older in Kansas; that age demographic makes up about one quarter of Iowa’s likely voters.
Zach Wahls, an Iowa state senator whose heavily Democratic district covers parts of Iowa City, a college town, said The Register’s poll tracked with the canvassing he had done in suburban Des Moines.
“Compare it to where we were two or four years ago, and it is a palpably more positive environment for Democrats,” Mr. Wahls said. “There’s no doubt about it.”
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