• Source: Ann Selzer

J. Ann Selzer (born 1956) is an American political pollster and the president of the Des Moines, Iowa-based polling firm Selzer & Company, which she founded in 1996. She was described as "the best pollster in politics" by Clare Malone of FiveThirtyEight, which also gives Selzer & Company a rare A+ grade for accuracy.
Her polls of Iowa voters had a reputation for being highly accurate, based on their performance in elections from 2008 through 2020. However, Selzer's polls incorrectly predicted Democratic victories in Iowa for the presidential elections of 2004 and 2024, with the latter missing by sixteen points in favor of Republican Donald Trump. She announced her retirement from the election polling part of her practice shortly after the 2024 election, announcing that she will focus on future endeavors in other parts of her business.




Early life and education


Selzer was born in Rochester, Minnesota, in 1956, the middle child in a family of five. She was raised in Topeka, Kansas. Selzer attended the University of Kansas, initially as a pre-med student, but eventually lost interest in medicine. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Speech and Dramatics Arts in 1978. She then earned a Ph.D. in Communication Theory and Research from the University of Iowa in 1984.




Career


After graduation, Selzer worked for The Des Moines Register. She established her own polling firm, Selzer & Company, in 1996. She worked as the pollster for the Des Moines Register for many years, and oversaw nearly all of the Register's Iowa Polls from 1987 to 2024, according to FiveThirtyEight. She has also done polling work for numerous other news organizations, including the Detroit Free Press and the Indianapolis Star. Recently, Selzer has partnered with Grinnell College as a part of the Grinnell College National Poll program.




= Polling methodology

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Selzer's polls utilize random sampling through random digit dialing in a dual-frame design with both landlines and cell phones. The sampling frame for her political polls of likely caucusgoers typically consist of lists of registered voters. Likely voters for relevant elections being polled are determined through self-reported responses on intention to vote or participate in caucuses. Selzer states that she uses minimal weighting in her polling, adjusting for demographic variables such as age, race, and sex with U.S. census data and declining to adjust for variables like recalled voting history.




= Results

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In the 2004 presidential election, Selzer's polling inaccurately predicted that John Kerry would win Iowa against George W. Bush. Selzer was the only pollster to correctly predict Barack Obama's comfortable victory in the 2008 Iowa Democratic caucuses, and her poll of the 2014 United States Senate election in Iowa also mirrored the actual result exceptionally closely.
Selzer & Co. conducted their final 2016 presidential poll in Iowa in early November, showing Donald Trump ahead of Hillary Clinton by seven percentage points. Most other polls at the time showed a much closer race. Trump won Iowa by 9.4 percentage points. Selzer's final Iowa poll ahead of the 2020 presidential election showed Trump ahead of Joe Biden by seven percentage points, and Republican Senator Joni Ernst ahead of Democratic challenger Theresa Greenfield by four percentage points. This was the only poll conducted in fall 2020 to show Trump ahead by more than two points, while Ernst's race was considered a toss-up. Trump won Iowa by 8.2 percentage points, while Ernst was re-elected by 6.6 points. In a post-election interview with Bloomberg, Selzer suggested that her polls' consistently high performance may be related to making fewer assumptions about the electorate, saying "I assumed nothing. My data told me."



2024 presidential election

Prior to the 2024 United States presidential election, Selzer & Co. released their final Iowa poll that had Kamala Harris leading Trump 47% to 44% in the state, markedly different from other polls that showed Trump with a significant lead. The poll was leaked ahead of its embargo, with Governor J. B. Pritzker of Illinois publicly discussing its results less than an hour before its scheduled release. Trump criticized the accuracy of the poll. Selzer responded by saying the poll used the same methodology as in 2016 and 2020, and that, "It would not be in my best interest, or that of my clients—The Des Moines Register and Mediacom—to conjure fake numbers."
Contrary to the poll, Trump won Iowa by a 13-point margin; the error of roughly 16 percentage points was by far the largest of any of Selzer's polls. She pledged to review the data to see if she could explain the significant polling error. FiveThirtyEight hypothesized that Selzer's methodology, which declines to weight for educational attainment and partisan identification, may have led to the divergent result. On November 17, 2024, Selzer announced her retirement from electoral polling, saying she had planned to do so before the 2024 election. Trump publicly accused her of "possible election fraud" and called for "an investigation" of her.




Final pre-election Selzer & Company polls






Notes






References






Further reading






External links


Appearances on C-SPAN
Who Is Ann Selzer? Pollster's Record as Iowa Poll Shows Kamala Harris Ahead

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