Meet the "Iowan whisperer"

If you have any interest at all in the Iowa Caucuses, or Iowa politics generally, you need to know the woman whose finger on the political pulse of this state is more accurate than any other.

Her name is Ann Selzer.

She tends to get different results from the other pollsters, and people scoff. But the biggest difference is that she tends to be right, and they tend to be wrong.

She saw both Barack Obama in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012 coming a mile away. People said she was crazy. But each time, when the smoke cleared on Caucus Night (or, in the case of the GOP in 2012, a few days later), she came up smelling like an Iowa wild rose. In Obama's case, she was the only one who had realized that a wave of first-time caucus-goers was going to throw all the traditional polls of customary caucus-goers into the proverbial cocked hat. In Santorum's, she and she alone saw that "Evangelical" voters were going to caucus in larger numbers than usual.

In 2014, all the other pollsters were saying that the U.S. Senate race between Republican Joni Ernst and Democrat Bruce Braley was going to be a cliffhanger. Selzer predicted that Ernst would win by seven percentage points.

She won by nine.

Selzer will release her first Iowa poll of the 2016 campaign tonight. Sadly, I dread the results.

HT: Drudge