Many readers may have already seen the news about a surprising poll to come out of Iowa, published by the Des Moines Register, and run by the highly respected, sometimes contrarian, pollster Ann Selzer. Her latest poll showed Vice President Harris leading in Iowa by 3%. This result surprised us too. Our last blog post about the state of the Election Lab map ended with the quote: “Nor will… Iowa turn Blue, even for the most diligent player.” Plenty of journalists and pundits have weighed in on the implications. But you can see for yourself by playing Election Lab, our U.S. Department of Education-funded learning game. One poll does not make any result a foregone conclusion. And ordinarily, we would not update our electoral map in Election Lab because of a single poll. In this case, however, there were three compelling reasons:

1. While many, many state polls have been conducted in the 7 swing states this year, the poll results show a suspicious amount of herding—their results in a tight race show too much agreement than would be expected by truly independent samples;
2. Iowa has been safely Red for the last two elections. Therefore not many pollsters (only 3) have paid attention to it;
3. Ann Selzer is highly respected, both for polling accuracy, and for not being afraid to publish a result that disagrees with the popular consensus.

If you try to think about the reasons why Iowa might be unexpectedly competitive this year, your imagination can run wild. Be wary of confirmation bias, the tendency to interpret information that fits a preconceived notion you may already favor. Sample bias is another problem that most Americans have, because they live in increasingly homogeneous groups that think alike. If your neighborhood, your circle of friends, and your digital newsfeed already agrees with you, you may have trouble seeing, much less understanding, what other parts of the country are experiencing. One intriguing explanation, that accounts for both why Iowa may be competitive, but Florida is not, and why Trump is ahead in Arizona and Nevada, but is doing less well in North Carolina, is the varying effects of inflation. Namely, where inflation has been bad, Trump is doing better, and inflation was not all that bad in Iowa, relative to the rest of the country. For the Election Lab game, and for the presidential campaigns themselves, the consequence of Iowa as a swing state has strategic implications. We will be playing this new map at our Live Event in just a few hours, at 4pm Pacific, 7pm Eastern time. We will have another event on Thursday, 11/7, at 6pm Pacific. With any luck, we will still be waiting for the election outcome, so you can still play Election Lab while waiting for the actual winner to be announced.