Selzer/DMR/Bloomberg FINAL IOWA POLL: Trump +5, Clinton +3

[HagridOfTheDeep]

Sheesa win

[HagridOfTheDeep]

Comparing the 2012 GOP poll numbers to the Democrats' numbers today is like comparing apples and oranges. It's true that anything can happen and that the race shifted quickly between the time of the Republican DMR poll and the actual caucuses last cycle, but there's no discernible momentum in the Dem race at the moment. Bodes well for Hillary, especially since it sounds like she has a built-in delegate advantage.

[HagridOfTheDeep]

Harry Enten looks at Selzer’s history in Iowa going back to 1988, finding that she’s only incorrectly called the winner once (Santorum beating Romney in 2012), and that the average error per candidate in the poll’s predictions across all years is just 3.3%.  However, with so many candidates running each year, you can be really close on most of them, but way off on one or two, and still manage a 3.3% average:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-final-des-moines-register-iowa-poll-is-out-how-accurate-will-it-be/

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Of course if she's off 3.3 points on both Hillary's and Bernie's support (those would tend to be very anti-correlated) in Hillary's favor, that means that Bernie leads by 3-4 points.

Or Hillary leads by 9 if it's not in her favour.

Either way, it's better to see these results if you're Hillary than if you're Bernie Sanders.