Ann Selzer

J. Ann Selzer is an American political pollster who is the president of the Des Moines, Iowa-based polling firm Selzer & Company, which she founded in 1994. She is known for her polls of Iowa voters, which have a reputation for being highly accurate.

Selzer was born in Rochester, Minnesota in 1957, the middle child in a family of five. She was raised in Topeka, Kansas. Selzer attended the University of Kansas, initially as a pre-med student, but eventually lost interest in medicine. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Speech and Dramatics Arts in 1978. She then earned a Ph.D in Communication Theory and Research from the University of Iowa in 1984.

After college, Selzer worked for the The Des Moines Register. She established her own polling firm, Selzer & Company, in 1994.

Selzer was the only pollster to correctly predict Barack Obama's comfortable victory in the 2008 Iowa Democratic caucuses, and her poll of the 2014 United States Senate election in Iowa also mirrored the actual result exceptionally closely. She has worked as the pollster for the Des Moines Register for many years, and has "overseen nearly every one of the Register’s Iowa Polls since 1987", according to FiveThirtyEight. She has also done polling work for numerous other news organizations, including the Boston Globe and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. In 2016, she was dubbed "the best pollster in politics" by Clare Malone of FiveThirtyEight, which also gave Selzer & Company a rare A+ grade for accuracy.

As of January 2016, she works out of an office in West Des Moines, Iowa.