Harris takes lead over Trump in Iowa: Poll

Vice President Harris has taken a 3-point lead over her opponent, former President Trump, in red-leaning Iowa, according to a new poll released on Saturday.

The new Des Moines Register/Mediacom survey found Harris outpacing Trump by 3 points, 47 percent to 44 percent, among Iowa’s likely voters, jumping ahead of the former president who won the state in both 2016 and 2020, by 9 points and 8 points, respectively. The result was just inside the survey’s margin of error.

The September iteration of the poll had Trump leading the vice president by 4 points.

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” pollster J. Ann Selzer told The Des Moines Register. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”

Former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who remains on the Iowa ballot, got 3 percent support. Libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver was at less than 1 percent. Some 3 percent said they were not sure about their choice, 2 percent did not share who they already voted for and 1 percent said they sided with someone else, according to the survey.

Both White House candidates have heavily campaigned in the seven battleground states. Neither has campaigned in Iowa following the conclusion of the party’s primaries, the Register noted. The last time a Democratic nominee won Iowa was former President Obama in 2012.

“Age and gender are the two most dynamic factors that are explaining these numbers,” Selzer said.

Harris leads Trump among women independent voters by 28 points, 57 percent to 29 percent, while the GOP nominee was ahead by 10 points among independent men voters, 47 percent to 37 percent, according to the poll.

The vice president has an advantage among those aged 65 and above. She leads Trump by 35 points, 63 percent to 28 percent, among senior women. Her lead is significantly smaller among senior men, beating Trump 47 percent to 45 percent, according to the survey.

Trump campaign senior advisor Jason Miller told reporters traveling with the former president that "every cycle there's one idiotic survey" when asked about the new survey, NewsNation reported.

Shortly after, the former president’s campaign released a memo, written by Trump’s chief pollster Tony Fabrizio and chief data consultant Tim Saler, saying that the Des Moines Register survey is an “outlier poll,” and referenced the Emerson College Polling/RealClearDefense survey, which had the former president up by 10 points.

“Unlike Emerson which transparently reports its share of partisans and the 2020 vote recall, Des Moines Register does NOT disclose the distribution of this information, even though they asked it in their survey,” they wrote in the memo.

The Des Moines Register/Mediacom survey found a larger contingent of Trump supporters being enthusiastic about backing the former president compared to Harris’s supporters. Around 76 percent of the ex-president’s supporters are “extremely or very enthusiastic” about their pick in this election, 5 points more than 71 percent that expressed the same about Harris.

Approximately 91 percent of respondents said they were firm about the choice in his White House election.

The poll was conducted Oct. 28-31 among 808 likely voters. The margin of error was 3.4 percentage points.

NewsNation is owned by Nexstar Media Group which also owns The Hill.

Updated at 10:10 p.m. EST.