What I'm reading: Ann Selzer

A+ pollster has the political world talking again

If you follow Iowa politics, you probably checked your social media shortly after 6 pm on Saturday to see the latest Iowa Poll by Selzer & Co for the Des Moines Register and Mediacom. “Election Twitter” lit up at Selzer’s latest numbers for the U.S. Senate race:

• Chuck Grassley (who has defeated all previous challengers by 20+ points) leads Mike Franken by just 46 percent to 43 percent among likely voters.

• Grassley’s approval rating is underwater for the first time in Iowa Poll history: 44 percent of Iowa adults approve of his job performance, while 48 percent disapprove.

• Independents surveyed prefer Franken by 46 percent to 35 percent.

Guest author Dan Guild, who’s studied political polling for decades, will delve into the Selzer poll in a post for Bleeding Heartland on Sunday. Meanwhile, I thought my Substack crowd would enjoy some background on Ann Selzer and her polling methods.

Selzer is one of very few pollsters to receive an A+ rating on FiveThirtyEight.com. To understand why, read Clare Malone’s 2016 profile, which highlighted Selzer’s “old-school rigor.”

Steven Shepard wrote about Selzer and her “secret sauce” at Politico before the 2016 caucuses. That cycle saw a rare Selzer miss: her final Iowa Poll for the Register had Donald Trump (not Ted Cruz) winning the GOP caucuses. She attributed that result to extremely high evangelical turnout and joked soon after, "If I’m demoted to 'silver standard,' I’m fine with that."

More often than not, Selzer’s findings have been accurate, even when her surveys looked like outliers. She identified Joni Ernst’s growing lead over Bruce Braley in the 2014 Senate race, and Trump’s larger-than-expected advantages in Iowa just before the 2016 and 2020 general elections.

One unusual feature of Selzer’s methodology: she doesn’t adjust (or “weight”) her findings based on expected partisanship or education level. From Malone’s article:

This unwillingness to guess lies at the heart of her thinking about polling; Selzer doesn’t want to prejudice herself. “I like to say, “Keep your dirty hands off your data,’” she said. “That’s the making assumptions of what is or isn’t going to happen and then deciding you’re going to weight down the minority vote because you don’t think they’re going to show up.”

I interviewed Selzer about her methodology and sampling methods shortly after the 2018 primary election. During our conversation, she explained,

I believe in weighting to known populations—in this case, the general population. We do not know the makeup of the population who will cast votes in the Democratic primary, so we do not make assumptions about what that demographic profile will be. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior—until there is change. We let our data tell us about any such change.

In addition to conducting the Iowa Poll for the Des Moines Register, Selzer runs the Grinnell College National Poll. Last month, that survey found, “In the wake of the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, 69% of Americans believe the option of having an abortion before the 15th week of pregnancy should be a guaranteed right.”

The same nationwide poll found Democrats leading on the generic Congressional ballot (46 percent to 42 percent), even though President Joe Biden’s approval rating was in negative territory (36 percent approve, 51 percent disapprove).

Incidentally, Dan Guild wrote at Bleeding Heartland earlier this year that Democrats have been doing substantially better on the generic ballot than Biden’s approval number. Dan found the gap “shockingly large.”

Selzer’s poll for Grinnell College found “Ninety-four percent of Republicans say the economy is a major factor in how they will vote (versus 60% of Democrats), while 80% of Republicans say what is happening in public schools is also a major factor (versus 63% of Democrats). Meanwhile, 85% of Democrats say abortion is a major factor, while only 53% of Republicans feel the same way.”

Abortion has become more salient for voters since the U.S. Supreme Court majority allowed states to trample on bodily autonomy. I’m interested to see the latest Iowa Poll numbers on this issue. In July, Selzer’s poll for the Des Moines Register found that 60 percent of Iowa adults believe abortion should be mostly or always legal, while just 34 percent said abortion should be mostly or always illegal.

Final note: Selzer is an occasional guest on the Iowa PBS program “Iowa Press.” Her most recent appearance was in November 2021. You can watch that show here (or read the transcript).