A few days before November’s presidential election, Ann Selzer, then considered the gold standard of polling in politics, released a highly anticipated poll for the Des Moines Register on where the presidential race stood in Iowa.

While the poll came from a state not expected to have a decisive role in the outcome of the election — Iowa is reliably red — its findings were expected to show clues as to how certain demographics would break nationwide. 

Selzer’s results sent shock waves through politics. Former Vice President Kamala Harris was up 3 percentage points over President Donald Trump in a state everyone considered to be a walk for Trump.

The poll results immediately had reporters scrambling, with gushing Harris-November surprise storylines in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Politico giving hope where no hope should have been given to Harris supporters looking for something to validate their wish that she would win.

If the gold standard of polling showed Trump was down in ruby-red Iowa, a state he won over then-candidate Joe Biden in 2020 by a whopping 8 points, then the door was open to the possibility that the working class in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and neighboring Wisconsin felt the same way Iowans did.

What was barely noticed that day, exactly one hour before her poll came out, was an Emerson/RealClearDefense poll showing Trump up 10 points over Harris in Iowa. It was a result that ended up being much closer to the 13.2 points Trump eventually won by.

The question is: Why did the reporters and cable news organizations that drive the conversation in U.S. politics give so much oxygen to a poll that was clearly an outlier and barely any coverage to the polling averaging done by RealClearPolitics, whose accuracy has been impeccable for the last two decades?

The answer is that, in the context of politics and news, there is an information war, and over the course of time, polling has become part of that war.

At the center of that war is RealClearPolitics, thanks in part to a New York Times article that accused it of failing to “filter out low-quality pollsters.” The story, written under the headline “How the Right Thinks Trump Is Running Away With the Race,” said by failing to doctor its polling averages, RealClearPolitics was now in the category of partisan polling and was undermining faith in the entire system.

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