DMR poll was a blow

COLLINS: And a lot of these polls haven’t changed much at all in recent months, but I think the most surprising result we got was last night when the Des Moines Register dropped its poll showing Harris above Trump and leading Trump. in Iowa, a state that you know has won twice, of course. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that Obama won Iowa too.

But to see those numbers there, I mean, Trump’s world was a little bit – I don’t want to overdramatize how they felt about this, but it was a blow to some of them who looked at this and said, what?

POLYANSKY: Well, look, this is a very close election. I’m not going to make a prediction here tonight unless you force me, and then I’ll go last. But the reality is that Iowa is Trump country. He’s not going to lose Iowa, and he’s going to win it comfortably.

COLLINS: But this is one of the best, the gold standard of pollsters.

POLYANSKY: I’m not dismissing Ann Seltzer by any means, but I will remind you that I was with Senator Cruz in 2016, hours before the Iowa caucus, when Trump defeated him by five points and we ended up beating Donald Trump by four points .

In this environment, you can’t, whether it’s the New York Times or the Des Moines Register, or unless it’s a CNN poll, you can’t pick out the outcome of an election in one poll. You can’t even do that with averages to that extent. And besides, there’s no way the vice president in a Midwestern state is going to win over white older women by 35 percent. It’s just not reality.

HERNDON: But I don’t think the individual poll result tells the full story. But I think it’s useful to compare it to the last one she took months ago where Donald Trump showed a twenty plus point lead, right? And so what we see is a reset race. I think it’s causing panic among a lot of Republicans because they see a Harris campaign that I think is delivering the messages they want at the right time.

And so whether or not she wins Iowa is a smaller question than whether she resets the race and puts it on her terms, with which that poll is consistent.

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I think the abortion ban in Iowa matters a lot. I think there has been an arrest of Republicans by evangelicals there, which has pulled the party away from its base. And so I think the overall story matters.

But can I say something about confidence in the elections? Whether Donald Trump accepts the outcome or not, he has already sown the seed. When I’m at the Republican polling places, they’re already saying the only outcome they trust is one where Donald Trump wins. People say that explicitly, that they can’t imagine a universe in which Kamala Harris got more votes. That is already the result of a candidate or institutions that have sown that trust and have done so over the past four years.

So whether he actually resets the result or not, it’s already there. And it’s been worth it –

COLLINS: These aren’t crazy, fringe people. These are normal people you’re talking to.

HERNDON: It’s a consistent thing that happens. I think if you’re in Republican circles, because it’s talked about, there’s still a belief that the last election was stolen. we hear about Dominion voting machines all the time. Like it’s not just Mike Lindell, right? I think there’s a broader area where this stuff has taken root.

And so leaving aside the question of whether it helps him in the election or not, I think it’s a very important story about trust in institutions.

COLLINS: Yeah, it’s even the people who don’t go to Trump rallies, or maybe what used to be described as country club Republicans, who are really getting into this, and that’s why when he says things like – I understand that he says it all the time and so sometimes it falls on deaf ears, but to hear him say the way he said it today, that he shouldn’t have left the White House the way he is, just really – I mean, it’s, that never happened before.

CUPP: No. And it’s really a reminder at the worst possible time of the kind of chaos and stuff that really turned off the voters he needs to pull him over the finish line. And as for the Iowa poll, I mean, look, if the Iowa poll is a bull’s-eye, and the chaser is too, we’re not going to have a long election week, okay? If that’s true, and Trump does so well, or Kamala does so well in Iowa, then it won’t last as long as we think.

But there are groups of voters in the seven swing states where we just don’t know what they’re going to do. They tell us that Kamala has ghost voters, these young college women who haven’t voted before. So we don’t know who they are yet, but they say they plan to vote for Kamala. With the youth vote you never know if they will actually show up. That’s for her.

In steel towns across Pennsylvania, there are groups of Hispanic men who say they plan to vote for Trump. Will they? Will they pull the lever for Trump? Did the Puerto Rico fiasco change their minds? Because a lot of them are Puerto Rican mainland voters. We don’t know.

So even when voters tell us what they plan to do, there are so many of these ghost pockets for both candidates in the battleground states that we just don’t know.

COLLINS: Yeah. It’s remarkable to see how close it is to The New York Times. But even if this Iowa poll is wrong, if she’s not going to win Iowa, but even if it’s within the eight-point margin of error, she says that women, 65-plus, 63 percent for Harris, 28 percent for Trump, even if that 10 percent is wrong, that is still striking for Iowa. Women overall in Iowa, Harris, 56 percent, Trump, 36 percent.

When I talk about the gut feelings within the Trump campaign, it’s not about the overall numbers. It’s the numbers among women because they say, is that how women in Wisconsin feel and in Michigan and these other states that we’re counting on?