Selzer’s surprise: Why the Roe reckoning may finally be here for Donald Trump

If the Selzer poll bears out to any degree tomorrow, we’re in for a decades-defining political backlash

Election Day is finally on our doorstep, and Kamala Harris is suddenly looking stronger than ever.

A weekend of campaigning across swing states such as Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia was overshadowed on Saturday by the political equivalent of a bomb going off. J. Ann Selzer, Iowa polling guru, dropped a late-game shocker: The Des Moines Register’s survey shows Kamala Harris up three points over Donald Trump in the state.

Is there suddenly a new state in play? Quite possibly — for all the bluster from the Trump camp Saturday evening and into Sunday about this being an “outlier”, it is only in the respect that other polls have been extremely careful to generously sample Republican-leaning constituencies throughout the campaign season. Selzer is sticking to her guns.

Her poll would have to be much further off than it has been in the past two election cycles for Harris to lose the state — and a victory there would cut Trump’s path to victory off at the knees. Even if it is off by as many as four percentage points, it’s hard to say that its findings should be doing anything besides raising the loudest alarm bells at Mar-a-Lago.

Take the findings with women: Harris is leading Trump by a stunning 2:1 margin with women who are 65 and above. Amid a campaign season dominated by ads about the deadly consequences of abortion bans that have cowed hospitals in red states into putting off lifesaving treatments for pregnant women, there’s only one real way to take it: a Roe reckoning.

A late-game poll shows Kamala Harris winning 2:1 with women ages 65 and older. (AFP via Getty Images)

That’s right. If the Selzer poll bears out to any degree tomorrow, we’re in for a decades-defining political backlash to the conservative Supreme Court decision overturning Roe vs Wade. What consequences will that have for the presidential race? What about the Senate race in Montana, where GOP candidate Tim Sheehy has called women “indoctrinated” on the issue of abortion rights and dismissively said that it was all younger women wanted to talk about? What about in Texas, where the state’s Cancun-visiting senator and wannabe podcaster Ted Cruz is facing potentially the toughest election night fight of his political career? Or Nebraska, where a Republican incumbent senator has suddenly found herself in danger of being unseated by an independent who says he won’t caucus with either party?

For days, it has looked like cracks were showing in the coalition that Trump put together in 2016 and tried to reassemble this year. A last-minute swing of three rallies in the state of North Carolina, which he won twice, suggested to many that his internals showed signs of danger there. His campaign no longer seems to be making a serious push for Wisconsin, instead focusing attention on Pennsylvania. Other polls have shown Harris up by several points in Michigan, suggesting that if any candidate is favored to come out ahead, it’s her.

We don’t yet know how deep the implications of such a massive gender gap are going to be. What we do know is they appear to be widespread: A second poll, released by The New York Times/Siena College this weekend, put Harris atop Trump in the following battlegrounds: Nevada, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Georgia. The two candidates were tied in Michigan and Pennsylvania; Trump, once dominant in the race, now only leads in Arizona.

It’s also clear that Tuesday is likely to be another night filled with victories for abortion rights campaigners, who have ballot initiatives in front of voters in Nebraska, Florida, Maryland and other states.

One thing is for sure; Kamala Harris seems to have the wind firmly at her back. Tuesday’s real question: how far will it push her?