While the focus has been on expectedly tight swing states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, a state in the heartland has shocked pollsters.
Kamala Harris leads in a new poll of likely Iowa voters, a complete flip of the candidate's projected performance in the state from earlier this year. Harris holds a 47% to 44% edge over Donald Trump in the new poll from the Des Moines Register.
That's the inverse of the way the candidates polled in the state in September, where Trump held a four-point lead over Harris. And it's an astonishing change from polls while President Joe Biden was in the race. The last poll of a Biden-Trump matchup gave Trump an 18-point lead over the president and the state has largely been taken for granted by both campaigns as an easy GOP win.
While the poll's latest results are essentially a toss-up — Harris' margin of victory falls within the poll's margin of error— it's still an encouraging sign for a Harris campaign that expected to be gutting out votes in key swing states with impossible-to-call polling.
“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” pollster J. Ann Selzer told the Register. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”
Harris won women in Iowa by 20 percentage points and independents have fallen into the Harris camp by a 46% to 39%. The poll of 808 likely voters also found that Harris has a startling lead among voters of 65, with 55% of respondents throwing in for the vice president to just 36% for Trump.
