The Trump campaign quickly branded the Selzer poll an outlier and pointed to another survey by Emerson College, released at the same time, showing Trump leading Harris 53 to 43 points in Iowa, a starkly different result. Both polls have a margin of error of 3.4 points.
In a memo released by the campaign, Republican pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Tim Saler said the Emerson poll more accurately reflected Iowa exit poll results from 2020, and did so “with far more transparency in [its] methodology”.
But the shock result will contribute to a sense of momentum behind Harris as a Marist Poll gave her a slim advantage in three critical “blue wall” states – three points in Michigan, and two points in both Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. All three were within the margin of error.
Early voting data is also cautiously encouraging for Harris. Just over 74 million Americans had voted as of Saturday night, with a slim majority of them women – although women always constitute a majority of voters in presidential elections.
Among new voters registering in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, female Democrats were the dominant group, and there were also more male Democrats than male Republicans (voters register as Democrats, Republicans or independent).
A racist joke by a guest speaker at Trump’s “celebration” rally last weekend allowed Harris to focus her message on Latino voters in the final full week of the campaign, while Trump’s remark that he would protect women from crime “whether the women like it or not” enabled a fresh emphasis on abortion – a strong point for the vice president.
A Donald Trump supporter wears a garbage bag at a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina.Credit: AP
But Harris also had to deal with blowback after President Joe Biden appeared to describe Trump’s supporters as “garbage” in an eerie repeat of Hillary Clinton calling his voter base a “basket of deplorables” in 2016. Biden said he misspoke, but Trump seized on it, and has been telling rally crowds Biden’s comment was much worse than Clinton’s.
Biden made a rare campaign appearance on Saturday in his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he joked about Trump’s backing from “macho guys” and suggested they were actually “the kind of guys you’d like to smack in the ass”.
Earlier, at a rally in Milwaukee, Trump engaged in a bizarre act with his microphone stand which some likened to simulating fellatio. After an assistant replaced a troublesome mic, the Republican nominee complained the stand had been too low, jerked it around with his hand, and then bobbed his head up and down with his mouth open.
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CNN commentator Ana Navarro, who is campaigning for Harris, said on X that the act was “not normal” and showed Trump was “disgusting, unhinged and unfit to represent the United States”.
Amid the technical difficulties, an angry Trump also vented about the crew, and asked his audience if they wanted to see him “knock the hell out of people backstage”.
“I get so angry. I’m up here seething. I’m working my ass off with this stupid mic,” he said. “I’m blowing out my left arm, now I’m gonna blow out my right arm, and I’m blowing out my damn throat too because of these stupid people.”
