Iowa Caucus Polls Pretty Much Nailed It

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images

People really love to trash election polls, for various reasons ranging from the self-interest of politicians who aren’t doing well to the nonsensical but common assertion that paying attention to public opinion data means ignoring substantive policy issues. When polls get election results wrong (most famously in 2016 when most of them suggested Hillary Clinton would handily defeat Donald Trump), there’s a great hue and cry about how worthless they are.

So it’s only fair that when polls are reasonably accurate, we should take note of it. And as it happens, despite many obstacles to accurate survey research, polls of the 2024 Iowa Republican caucus pretty much nailed it.

The final RealClearPolitics polling averages for Iowa had Trump at 52.5 percent (he actually received 51 percent), Nikki Haley at 18.8 percent (she won 19.1 percent), Ron DeSantis at 15.7 percent (he won 21.2 percent), and Vivek Ramaswamy at 6.8 percent (he wound up at 7.7 percent). Taking into account margins of error, that’s amazingly spot-on for Trump, Haley, and Ramaswamy. And it’s not like pollsters missed the strong possibility that DeSantis would wind up edging Haley. Ann Selzer, whose Iowa Poll for the Des Moines Register, NBC News, and Mediacom is the “gold standard” survey for the state, stressed the enthusiasm advantage DeSantis (and Trump) had over Haley in her pre-caucus analysis of the polling data.

The accuracy of Iowa polling is all the more remarkable when you understand the problems these pollsters faced. It’s tough enough to estimate likelihood to vote in a party primary (primary polling is typically much less accurate than general-election polling). It’s much tougher to figure out who is going to be willing to attend a caucus, which requires a much greater investment of time and energy. Add in the ferocious and constantly changing weather afflicting this year’s caucuses, and you have a recipe for a polling disaster. Plus, identifying Trump voters is notoriously difficult, yet nobody was far off in predicting that the former president would win about half the caucus vote.

So perhaps going forward, people should be less dismissive of polls generally and specifically. Yes, many of the 2020 presidential-election polls missed the Electoral College breakdown (though not so much the popular-vote totals) by a fair amount, but the 2022 midterm polls were quite accurate. Maybe major polling failures are the exception rather than the rule. And don’t forget that the answer to inadequate data is more and better data, not rejecting data in favor of anecdotal evidence, hunches, or campaign spin.

There is one polling question emerging from Iowa that is worth thinking about for a moment: the use of caucus entrance polls, which allowed media outlets to call Trump the winner about 30 minutes after the Iowa GOP caucus began. Entrance polls are not exactly like primary exit polls, taken when voters have already voted; it’s entirely likely that at some caucus sites, participants were still listening to pitches by candidate representatives when their phones lit up with the news that Trump had already won.

Ron DeSantis tried to use this phenomenon to accuse the media of “election interference,” a rather absurd extension of Trump’s own habitual claims that any adverse election results are fake. No one paying much attention was in serious doubt that Trump would finish first, and nobody called the contest for second place between DeSantis and Haley until virtually all the votes had been counted. And the potential risk of influencing voters is significantly lower than in every presidential race when states are called when their own polls close even though polls in others are still open, sometimes for hours.

Still, the gap in time between the moment caucusgoers enter a caucus site and the moment they vote is sufficient to suggest that maybe media calls should await significant actual results. But this is a question about the use of polls, not the accuracy or relevance of polling itself. The interviewers and number crunchers did just fine in Iowa.