CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins says Trumpworld sources told her the new poll out of Iowa was a “gut punch” to former President Donald Trump’s campaign.
With only hours to go before Election Day, the dominant storyline is the bombshell Des Moines Register poll showing Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of Trump in Iowa, a state he won twice in overwhelming fashion. The DMR poll, overseen by pollster Ann Selzer, is considered the “Gold Standard” Iowa poll.
On Sunday night’s edition of CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Collins — whose Trump sources are on par with anyone’s — reported that the poll blindsided the campaign:
COLLINS: And so many of these polls have not changed at all very much in the last few months, but I think maybe the most surprising result we got was last night when the Des Moines Register dropped its poll that shows Harris above Trump, leading Trump in Iowa, a state, of course, that you know he has won twice. I mean, it was not that long ago Obama won Iowa as well.
But to see those numbers there, I mean, Trump world was kind of — I don’t want to overdramatize how they felt about this, but it was like a gut punch to some of them who were looking at this and saying, 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’m going to go last. But the reality is 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 stretch, but I’ll remind you back in 2016 when I was with Senator Cruz, hours before the Iowa caucus then, she had Trump beating him by five points and we ended up beating Donald Trump by four points.
You cannot, in this environment, whether it’s The New York Times or the Des Moines Register, or unless it’s a CNN poll maybe, you can’t take one poll and extract the outcome of an election. You can’t even do that with averages to that degree. And, by the way, there’s just — there’s no way that the vice president is winning white senior women by 35 percent in a Midwest state. It’s just not reality.
HERNDON: But the individual result of the poll, I think doesn’t tell the full story. But I think it’s helpful to compare it to is the previous one she took months ago that showed Donald Trump up by 20- plus points, right? And so what we see is a reset race. I think it’s causing the panic among a lot of Republicans because they see a Harris campaign that I think is landing on the messages they want at the right time.
And so whether she wins Iowa or not, kind of is a smaller question than that she reset the race and brought it to her terms, which that poll is consistent with.
[21:10:01]
I think the abortion ban in Iowa matters a lot. I think there has been a capture of Republicans by evangelicals there that has pulled away the party from the base. And so I think that the aggregate story matters.
But can I say one point on the trust in the elections? Whether Donald Trump accepts the result or not, he has already sown that seed. When I am at Republican polling places, they are already saying that the only result they trust is a result where Donald Trump wins. People say that explicitly, that they cannot imagine a universe in which Kamala Harris received more votes. That is already the result of a candidate or institutions that have sown that trust and done so for the last four years.
So, whether he actually resets the result or not, it’s already there. And it’s been the effort —
COLLINS: These aren’t like crazy, fringe people. These are normal people that you’re talking with.
HERNDON: It’s a consistent thing that happens. I think when you’re in Republican spaces, because it’s been the talk, 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 that there is a wider swath where this stuff has taken root.
And so beyond the question of whether it helps him in the election or not, I think it’s a really important story about trust in institutions.
COLLINS: Yes, it’s even the people who don’t go to Trump rallies, or maybe that what used to be described as country club Republicans that, that are really bought into this, which is why when he says things like — I get that he says it all the time and so it kind of falls on deaf ears sometimes, but to hear him saying the way he said it today, that he shouldn’t have left the White House as he is just really — I mean, it’s, that never happened before this.
CUPP: No. And it really is a reminder at the worst possible time of the kind of chaos and stuff that really repelled the voters he needs to pull him over the finish line. And to the Iowa poll, I mean, look, if the Iowa poll is a shot, the chaser is, we will not have a long election week, okay? If that’s true, and Trump is doing that well, or Kamala is doing that well in Iowa, it’s not going to be as long as we think it is.
But there are these pockets of voters in the seven swing states that we just don’t know what they’re going to do. They’re telling us, right, Kamala’s got these ghost voters, these young college aged women who have not voted before. So, we don’t know who they are yet, but they’re saying they intend to vote for Kamala. With the youth vote, you never know if they’re actually going to turn up. That’s for her.
There’s pockets in steel towns across Pennsylvania of Hispanic men saying they intend 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 are telling us what they Indicate what they plan to do, there’s so many of these ghost pockets for both candidates across the battleground states, we just can’t we just can’t tell.
COLLINS: Yes. It’s remarkable to see just how close it is in The New York Times. But even if this poll is wrong in Iowa, if she’s not going to win Iowa, but even if it’s within the margin of error of eight points, she says women, 65-plus, 63 percent for Harris, 28 percent for Trump, even if that’s wrong by 10 percent, that’s still striking for Iowa. Women overall in Iowa, Harris, 56 percent, Trump, 36 percent.
When I talk about the gut punch inside the Trump campaign, it’s not the overall numbers. It’s the numbers with women, because they’re like, is that how women in Wisconsin feel and Michigan and these other states that we are counting on?
Watch above via CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins.
