New poll shows Kamala Harris ahead by 3 points in Iowa

Candidates in battleground states as early voting comes to an end

Heading into the final weekend before Election Day 2024, former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are both in North Carolina, aiming to secure last-minute support. FOX 5's Jessica Formoso has the latest.

A shocking new Iowa poll shows Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump by 3 points in the Hawkeye State.

The Des Moines Register-sponsored poll of Iowa was released Saturday, three days before the Nov. 5 election. It was done by J. Ann Selzer, the "gold standard" pollster in Iowa, according to Axios.

The poll is an outlier – an Emerson poll released Saturday showed Trump ahead by 10 points in Iowa – but it does hint that there could be some surprises come Tuesday. Selzer is known for past polls that accurately predicted Trump's 8-point lead in Iowa over Joe Biden in 2020 and his comfortable victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

One big takeaway: The poll shows Harris with a 20 percentage point lead over Trump among women, and she's cut his lead among men by half since September. Overall, the poll shifted seven points away from Trump to Harris since September.

MORE: Harris vs. Trump: Who's winning the election with 3 days to go?

The poll was conducted Oct. 28-31 among 808 likely Iowa voters. That was after Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, when several of Trump’s allies made racially charged remarks targeting Harris and key voter groups.

"It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming," Seltzer told The Des Moines Register on Saturday. "She has clearly leaped into a leading position."

Iowa had long been a battleground state for presidential candidates: it had the narrowest presidential vote margins in the 2000 and 2004 elections, when it voted for Democrat Al Gore and then for Republican George W. Bush.

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Barack Obama was the last Democrat to win the state in 2008 and 2012, and changes in the state’s political leanings since then were thought to have pushed Iowa further out of reach for Democrats.

The GOP holds all of Iowa’s congressional seats, the governorship, most statewide offices and lopsided majorities in the state Legislature. Trump won Iowa by comfortable margins in 2016 and 2020. This year, neither candidate nor their running mates have visited Iowa since becoming their parties’ nominees.

Iowa has six electoral votes.

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