Trump’s Iowa Win Is a Harsh Reminder to Never Trust Election Polls
Former President Donald Trump has won Iowa in the 2024 presidential election and taken its six electoral votes, according to the Associated Press.
Trump won with 56.5 percent to Kamala Harris’s 41.9 percent, with 65 percent of votes reported. Trump’s win gives the former president a total of 207 electoral votes, closer to the 270 total needed to win the White House. Harris has 91 votes.
The win puts a damper on Kamala Harris’s momentum. Just days before the election, one poll in the Hawkeye State showed a stunning three-point lead for Harris in a Midwestern state that hadn’t been won by a Democratic presidential candidate since 2012. The poll shocked Trump and the political establishment and led many to believe Harris’s path to victory—and the Democratic Party’s control of the House–would be all but guaranteed.
In 2020, Trump won the state by eight points, earning 897,672 votes to Joe Biden’s 759,061. Trump also won the state in 2016, while President Barack Obama took Iowa in 2008 and 2012. Previously, Democrats won every other presidential election in the state going back to 1988, with the exception of George W. Bush’s victory in 2004. Trump won the state by a margin of 156,193, according to the AP’s count thus far.
Trump will be glad to have won Iowa, especially after the last-minute shock poll. The rest of the battleground states are still in play.