IA-Selzer: Trump +7

[Tekken_Guy]

Districts:

IA-01: R+15
IA-02: R+1
IA-03: D+6
IA-04: R+17

What the....?

[Tekken_Guy]

Districts:

IA-01: R+15
IA-02: R+1
IA-03: D+6
IA-04: R+17

What the....?

I said almost two years ago that Finkenauer would be one of the most likely Dem flips.

Firstly, she's not a good candidate. Also there are no major cities in her district (Cedar Rapids doesn't count), not many suburbs, virtually no minorities and it's not particularly well educated. A district like that is not staying Dem in 2020 outside of New England.

But Trump only won here by about 4 points. This district is just like Cheri Bustos’ and Ron Kind’s districts, and neither of them seem in much trouble.

[Tekken_Guy]

Districts:

IA-01: R+15
IA-02: R+1
IA-03: D+6
IA-04: R+17

What the....?

I said almost two years ago that Finkenauer would be one of the most likely Dem flips.

Firstly, she's not a good candidate. Also there are no major cities in her district (Cedar Rapids doesn't count), not many suburbs, virtually no minorities and it's not particularly well educated. A district like that is not staying Dem in 2020 outside of New England.

But Trump only won here by about 4 points. This district is just like Cheri Bustos’ and Ron Kind’s districts, and neither of them seem in much trouble.

They're entrenched and Bustos is a high ranking Dem. Kind will be gone in the next Dem midterm and Bustos will only survive due to gerrymandering. If Illinois passes fair redistricting she's likely out too in the next D midterm.

Well, Miller-Meeks doesn’t seem to be pulling away with IA-2 either.

[Tekken_Guy]

Not y'all trying to unskew the results through their CD polls. It's n = 200, they're bound to be wonky. The n = 800 sample that shows a Biden collapse is really the only part of the poll that matters.

They apparently weight by congressional district so yes they actually may matter

Maybe Cedar Rapids was really underpolled. I mean Biden is blowing it out of the park in Ashley Hinson’s state house district that Hillary barely won, if the PPP poll is to be believed.

[Tekken_Guy]

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/iowa/

Here’s the 2016 polling forecast from 538. Note that Hillary had not reached 45% in an Iowa poll since August.

[Tekken_Guy]

Acknowledging small sample sizes, my experience with phonebanking/canvassing tells me that "don't wanna tell you my vote" probably tilts towards older voters. I also suspect Trump has more support in that group than Biden.

Have you not seen how Biden is improving with seniors?

[Tekken_Guy]

This is a really really bad poll for Dems, perhaps the worst one all year. I wasn't really expecting Biden to win Iowa and would have been pleasantly surprised if he did (just did my prediction map with it going R yesterday), but the really bad thing about this is it suggests that Trump's gains (and over the longer term the GOP's gains) among northern/midwestern rural WWC whites were not a one time wonder. This means we should be worried in particular about Wisconsin and Michigan as well, and to a lesser extent Minnesota and Pennsylvania (though in those states I think the Minneapolis/Philadelphia suburbs will be enough of a countertrend regardless). Also despite most polls of ME-02 having Trump up, this suggests he could win that again. Yes, those other state are different from Iowa in various ways, but it is unlikely that WWC voters will swing/trend in a massively different direction in those different states.

This is just a single poll, but it is a very important one because it is the first significant hint that Trump may have a chance in quite a while.

Overall, this greatly raises Trump's chances of winning from essentially non-existent to give Trump a non-trivial chance of pulling out a skin-of-his-teeth win. And that is too high of a chance.

If this does come to pass, over the longer term, this points to the electoral college and the Senate becoming more systemically biased in favor of the GOP.

If nothing else good comes out of this, hopefully one thing this will accomplish is to persuade more Dems of the necessity of abolishing the electoral college, and abolishing the Senate and/or adding lots of new states and/or changing it so that states don't all have exactly 2 Senators.

Maybe it means the WWC voters are doing one last “swan song” for Biden like Dixiecrats did for Carter and suburbanites for Romney.