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.

The Michigan Supreme Court has flipped blue in a serious way.

Democratic nominees Kyra Bolden and Kymberly Ann Thomas each won judicial elections Tuesday night, taking over a court that Republicans had controlled for decades. Bolden is the first Black woman to serve on the Michigan Supreme Court. The state Supreme Court now sits at a 5-2 Democratic majority, with five liberals, one conservative, and one moderate.

This victory may signal optimism for Democrats in Michigan, as the crucial swing state comes down to the wire between presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The presidential election has not yet been called. Issues like reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, and other hugely impactful policies are now under Democratic jurisdiction.

Donald Trump won Anson County, North Carolina, on Tuesday, the first time the county has supported a Republican candidate since the 1970s, and only the second time in more than one hundred years.

Trump received 51.8 percent of the vote compared to Kamala Harris’s 48.3 percent, with 91.8 percent reporting, per NBC News.

Since U.S. Reconstruction, Anson County has voted for the Republican presidential candidate just two times: the first being Richard Nixon in 1972, and now Trump, according to WFAE’s Steve Harrison.

Anson has been experiencing a rightward shift observed in other rural counties in North Carolina, according to WUNC.

North Carolina has yet to be called in the presidential race.

Bomb threats have been made against four voting sites in Navajo County, Arizona.

The threats are unsubstantiated, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said, adding, “We have no reason to believe any voters or polling places are in jeopardy.”

The threats originated from a .ru email address, but Fontes said there was no confirmation that the threats came directly from Russia.

“The motive appears to ensue chaos, not to impact any political outcome,” Fontes said.

“This is another—we believe—probing attack,” Fontes added. “We also have reason to believe—although I won’t get into specifics—that this comes from one of our foreign enemies, namely Russia.”

Also in Arizona, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is investigating a bomb threat made inside the Maricopa County Superior Court where the recorder’s office is located. The threat is similar to the other threats in Arizona and elsewhere around the country, the sheriff’s office said.

“This is a national and state trend we are seeing with bomb threats. The information contained in the threat has been the same to all the other areas in the county. MCSO and our local partners are taking this matter seriously and will investigate. At this point there is no credible information to this issue,” Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Sergeant Joaquin Enriquez said in a statement.

Bomb threats have been reported in several other battleground states, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. None have been shown to be credible, the FBI says.

District Attorney Fani Willis was reelected Tuesday in Fulton County for a second four-year term. Willis is most known for bringing charges against former President Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.  

Willis defeated her Republican opponent, Courtney Kramer, an attorney and former Trump White House intern.

In 2023, the Fulton County District Attorney’s office indicted Trump and 18 others on felony charges in a large-scale racketeering case for their attempted election interference. Trump and other defendants continue to delay the case, successfully pushing back the first hearing to December. One successful tactic has been to try to throw doubt on Willis’s credibility in the case.

In her time in office, Willis has faced extreme Republican vitriol and threats, but her reelection means that Trump will hopefully have to face the music down the road.