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DES MOINES, Iowa — Even though the Presidential election has still not been called two days post-Election Day, it’s clear the race was a lot closer than many polls predicted. However, there was at least one poll that got it right, the Iowa Poll.

“The time between when our poll numbers are published and the time when they start counting votes it’s a it’s a cloud of anxiety,” President of Selzer & Co., J. Ann Selzer said. “You don’t know what to wish for, except that you hope you’re not a goat, you hope to be golden.”

The Saturday before the 2020 general election, The Des Moines Register and Mediacom released the final Iowa Poll conducted by Selzer & Co. The poll was quickly called an “outlier.” The results had President Donald Trump leading former Vice President Joe Biden by seven percentage points, 48% to 41%. But as the votes started rolling on Tuesday it was clear Selzer’s data was accurate and the majority of polls predicting Biden to win by a landslide were off.

“When you come out with a poll that goes against [a certain] candidate, they don’t like hearing that. So all of a sudden this poll becomes a bad poll or an outlier or something,” David Yepsen a long-time political journalist and current host of Iowa PBS’ Iowa Press Program said. “It’s important that a campaign look at it and say, ‘What is it? What is this really telling us?’ because in fact, Ann Selzer’s poll was correct. It did model the electorate correctly. She spotted a lot of these trends late and she got it right. So she’s getting the last laugh here.”

In Iowa, President Trump ended up winning by eight percentage points, 53% to 45%, with the six electorate votes going his way. Yepsen said he feels a lot of the other polls across the nation underweighted the independents who shifted to President Trump.

“We’ve been in this position before. So our approach, when we see numbers that we think will be surprising to the public, is just double-check all of the data and make sure that there isn’t anything about it that makes us wonder,” Selzer said. “My job, my approach is to give it my best shot and to not leave anything undone that I think would make my polling data more accurate. So, once we go through that whole drill and give it to our clients at The Des Moines Register and Mediacom for their work on it and publication, then we just have to sit on our hands and wait and see.”

Selzer said she also never assumes what happened before will happen again in the future. She said many other polls get tempted looking backward.

“There isn’t anything in our method that says, ‘well here’s what happened in 2016 so we want to make our data in some ways demographically mostly look like that.’ We sort of get out of the way of our data showing us,” Selzer said.

Many other polls were strikingly different than what happened on Election Day. For example, an ABC News/Washington Post poll in Wisconsin published in the last week had Biden ahead by 17 points. In reality, Biden only won by less than a percentage point and President Trump is already calling for a recount.

“A good poll is hard to do. All the pieces have to come together,” Yepsen said. “Usually the mistake with most polls is they don’t model the electorate correctly. They don’t get the mix of what the electorate is going to look like, correct. They have too many senior citizens, or not enough young people, or too few minorities. You’ve got to get that model, that profile of what the electorate looks like before you start going out surveying people.”

It was multiple incorrect political polls like the one in Wisconsin that caused people like former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to say “polling is as obsolete as an 8-track tape” and Republican pollster Frank Luntz to tell Fox News his “profession is done.”

Both Selzer and Yepsen believe what happened in 2016 and now 2020 certainly isn’t helping the industry, but believe the demand is still there from the media for these polls.

“There’s no question that polling is getting harder and harder. I used to say with every election cycle, now I say it with every hour. It is just more difficult,” Selzer said. “At the end of the day, we rely on respondents to answer their phone and to be willing to talk to us for no money it’s a volunteer effort. So there’s work to be done in terms of the image of the polling industry so that people will want to be a part of it and will understand it has a role. However, there’s probably also work to be done in how we go about it and and how long we will be able to have an accurate measure of public opinion.”

“I think pollsters have to do a post mortem, figure out what they did right, what they did wrong. The fact is, I think they did a better job this time than they did four years ago, but it’s hard. People don’t answer phones, the electorate changes. It’s a difficult task for pollsters. People don’t like to answer questions. It’s a science. They have to use different methodologies.” Yepsen said. “I think polls are useful. They tell us what’s really going on in the electorate, how people really feel. I think that’s important in a democracy, but it requires the pollsters to get their work right. And it requires politicians to be honest with themselves. When they get a bad poll, don’t shoot the messenger, but get their own act together.”