Iowa Poll has Harris up three on Trump: Implications for swing states

Nobody was even thinking of Iowa as a swing state, but the final pre-election Iowa Poll released on Saturday has the state swinging alright – from Donald Trump, who won Iowa in 2016 and 2020, to Kamala Harris.

You’re hearing now from the Trump camp, predictably, that the poll is “fake,” but they weren’t saying that when the Iowa Poll had Trump up 18 on Joe Biden back in the summer, and four points on Harris in September.

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., in an interview with the Des Moines Register. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”

Neither of the major-party campaigns has been on the ground in Iowa since the state’s caucuses earlier this year, so the swing picked up in this final Iowa Poll of the cycle is totally organic, and driven, from a look at the poll’s internals, by independent women, who are favoring Harris by a 28-point margin, according to the poll.

Harris’s lead is even bigger among senior women, who back the Democrat by 35 points.

For context, the only other polling done in Iowa in the past two months, by Emerson College, has Trump up nine points on Harris in the state.

No offense to the folks at Emerson College, but the Iowa Poll and Selzer have a reputation of being the poll to go with in Iowa, which is why you’re hearing a lot about it right now, because of what these numbers would mean not just for Iowa, but the overall national race.

It wouldn’t take much to read from this swing in Iowa, where neither party has been actively working since January, that the late break to Harris that had seemed to be coming for weeks is finally showing up in the polls.

You could extrapolate similar breaks fueled by independent women voters as we’re seeing in Iowa in the Midwest Blue Wall states – Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Throw in the too-close-to-call states in the Southeast, North Carolina and Georgia, and in the Southwest, in Nevada and Arizona, and what we’ve been told for months is a 50/50 race between Harris and Trump could turn into an Electoral College blowout for the vice president.