Vice President Kamala Harris has a slight edge over former president Donald Trump in Iowa, according to a surprising new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll.
The new poll finds Harris leading Trump 47 percent to 44 percent among likely voters. The previous Iowa Poll, in September, showed Trump leading Harris by four percentage points. In a June survey, before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, Trump led the president by 18 percentage points.
“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”
“Age and gender are the two most dynamic factors that are explaining these numbers,” Selzer said.
While Trump has previously enjoyed the support of Iowa’s independent voters in the lead-up to this election, independent women now support Harris by a 28-point margin, while independent men break for Trump by a smaller margin.
Harris also won the support of the majority of voters age 65 and older. She won the support of senior women 63 percent to 28 percent, though she leads Trump among senior men by just two percentage points.
The poll was conducted among 808 likely Iowa voters between October 28 and 31 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
While Iowa was once seen as a battleground state, it has leaned increasingly red in the last decade. Though the state supported Democrats in six out of seven elections between 1992 and 2012, it has overwhelmingly voted in support of Trump in the last two elections.
Neither candidate has campaigned in the state since the conclusion of the Iowa caucus.
The poll has accurately predicted the winner of the state in each of the last three elections. In 2012, the Iowa Poll found then-president Obama beating Senator Mitt Romney 47 percent to 42, while Obama ultimately won the state 52 percent to 46 percent.
In 2016, the poll showed Trump ahead of Hillary Clinton 46 percent to 39 percent. Trump won the state with 51 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 42 percent.
And in 2020, Trump won the state 53 percent to then-candidate Biden’s 45 percent, after the polling had found Trump leading Biden 48 percent to 41 percent.
As National Review reported last week, Trump’s overall stronger performance this cycle in RealClearPolitics’ national and battleground-state polling averages compared with 2016 and 2020 have Republicans feeling confident.
Trump is currently better positioned in the polls than he has been at any other time throughout his three presidential campaigns. He currently leads Harris by 0.3 percentage point in a RealClearPolitics average. By contrast, with three days until Election Day, Biden led Trump by 7.8 percentage points in the 2020 RCP polling average. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton led Trump by 1.5 percentage points.
A Trump campaign adviser told National Review that in addition to polling, Republicans have also far outpaced mail-in ballot requests and returns that were seen in 2020, and the voter registration gap has closed.
“So just looking at the metrics, things are way more favorable for us than they were in 2020,” the adviser said, expressing cautious optimism.