I was waiting outside the PNC Music Pavilion in Charlotte, North Carolina after Vice President Kamala Harris’s rally when my phone started to blow up. Ann Selzer, the vaunted pollster of Iowa, had just dropped a poll showing that Harris was leading Trump by three points in the Hawkeye State — a state Trump had won twice. Everyone in the political world wanted to talk about it.
The Trump campaign knew how bad this news looked. Tony Fabrizio and Tim Saler, the Trump campaign’s data men, released a memo challenging the findings almost immediately.