This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
Last week, we outlined five reasons we believe Kamala Harris will win the US election. This week, I am prepared to go one step further.
A Selzer survey released on Saturday shows the Democrats leading in Iowa by three percentage points, which is significant considering that Donald Trump won there by eight points in 2020. It is also significant because Selzer is widely believed to be as accurate a pollster as you are likely to find. When a ‘red wave’ failed to materialize in the 2022 Senate elections, they got the outcome spot on. When Trump was favoured to win a second term in 2020, their forecasts were a point out, and in 2016, when the same man shocked the world by bagging his first term, their numbers predicted that such an outcome would be so.
As such, for some poll watchers, their survey has taken on a near-mythical ability to forecast the election across the country. Where other pollsters are “herding” at 50:50 to protect themselves after past misses, Selzer has let their tried and tested modelling do the talking, and the results suggest Harris will do far better in the Hawkeye State than most had previously thought, which is huge because, let’s face it, no one was really talking about Iowa.
In June, the BBC identified seven swing states that would decide a closely contested election in the States. Tellingly, Iowa was not one of them. In Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin and Nevada, Joe Biden won by fewer than 50,000 votes in 2020, while the Rust Belt States of Pennsylvania and Michigan tend to garner plenty of attention these days. North Carolina was in there too, and for good reason. Solid red states are in play at this election just as much as blue. If they weren’t, Trump wouldn’t be returning to North Carolina each day until the election and holding rallies in places like Greensboro, where he proudly declared there are no empty seats at his campaigns to a half-full arena.
There are echoes here in the UK general election, where Rishi Sunak spent much of his time not visiting places he intended to win, but places he couldn’t afford to lose. They, like Trump, had spent too much time preaching to their base with aggressive, mainly anti-immigrant rhetoric rather than looking to broaden their appeal, which is where Labour prevailed and, I believe, so too will the Democrats. Bear in mind that in July, Sir Keir Starmer delivered a landslide victory without increasing his party’s vote share on the 2017 election, proving that you can win big if you fight smart. This contest bears many of the hallmarks of that election, except that for the Republicans, smarts are probably the one thing Trump lacks the most.
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