Sunday’s Iowa Poll for the Des Moines Register stunned political observers because it showed Kamala Harris defeating Donald Trump by three points in a state that Trump won by eight points in 2020. If Trump loses Iowa, could other “red” non-swing states be in play?

What made the Iowa Poll have such an impact is that Ann Selzer is a highly respected pollster who called Trump’s margin in Iowa to within a point in 2020.

But all pollsters have bad polls, and there is some evidence that Selzer’s poll is a blurry snapshot. An Emerson poll came out the same day and showed Trump with a healthy ten-point lead.

Selzer also admitted that her client, the Register, won’t release the cross tabs of the poll, thus limiting its transparency. But the biggest reason for doubt are Selzer’s numbers in down-ballot races for House seats.

The Register reports: “Now, voters prefer a Democratic candidate by a 16-point margin in the 1st District, where Democrat Christina Bohannan, a law professor and former state representative, is in a rematch with Republican U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who is seeking her third term.”

Miller-Meeks first won her seat with 50.1 percent in 2020, but then defeated Bohannan in 2022 by nearly seven percentage points. It is highly unusual for a non-scandal-ridden incumbent to lose a House seat by 16 points. In the 2022 general election, only nine House incumbents lost.

Only one was defeated by a margin greater than eight points — and that involved special circumstances. Democrat Al Lawson of Florida was redistricted into a gerrymandered district by the Republican legislature. He had a hopeless race in a district that Donald Trump had carried with almost two-thirds of the vote in both 2016 and 2020.

The Iowa poll that so stirred up both campaigns is highly likely to be an outlier.