COLLINS: And so many of these polls haven’t changed very much at all over the last few months, but I think maybe the most surprising result that we got was last night when the Des Moines Register dropped the poll that shows Harris above Trump, ahead of Trump. in Iowa, a state, of course, that you know he won twice. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that Obama won Iowa, too.

But to see those numbers there, I mean, Trump’s world was kind of — I don’t want to exaggerate how they felt about it, but it was like a punch in the gut for some of them who were looking at it and saying, What?

POLYANSKY: Well, look, it’s a very close election, I’m not going to make a prediction here tonight unless you force me to, and then I’ll go last. But the reality is that Iowa is Trump country. He won’t lose Iowa and will win it comfortably.

COLLINS: But this is one of the best, the gold standard of surveyors.

POLYANSKY: I’m not ruling out Ann Seltzer at all, but I remind you in 2016 when I was with Senator Cruz, hours before the Iowa caucus then, she had Trump beating him by five points and we ended up beating him on Donald. Trump by four points.

You can’t, in this environment, whether it’s The New York Times or the Des Moines Register, or if it’s not a CNN poll, maybe, you can’t take one poll and extract the result of an election. You can’t even do that with mediums to this degree. And by the way, there’s just – there’s no way the vice president is going to win senior white women by 35 percent in a Midwest state. It’s just not reality.

HERNDON: But the individual poll result, I think, doesn’t tell the whole story. But I think it’s useful to compare it to the previous one he took months ago, which showed Donald Trump up by 20 points, right? And what we’re seeing is a race to reset. I think it’s causing panic among a lot of Republicans because they see a Harris campaign that they think is landing on the messages they want at the right time.

And so whether or not she wins Iowa is less of a question than whether she reset the race and brought it on her terms, which the polling is consistent with.

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I think banning abortion in Iowa matters a lot. I think there was a capture of the Republicans by the evangelicals there that took the party off the ground. And so I think the aggregate story matters.

But can I make a point about confidence in elections? Whether Donald Trump accepts the outcome or not, he has already planted that seed. When they’re at the Republican polls, they’re already saying that the only outcome they trust is an outcome in which Donald Trump wins. People say this explicitly, that they can’t imagine a universe where Kamala Harris got more votes. This is already the result of a candidate or institutions that have sown this trust and have done so for the last four years.

So whether it resets the result or not, it’s already there. And it was the effort –

COLLINS: They’re not like crazy, fringe people. These are normal people you are talking to.

HERNDON: It’s a consistent thing that happens. I think when you’re in Republican spaces, because it was talked about, it’s still believed that the last election was stolen. we hear about Dominion voting machines all the time. Like it’s not just Mike Lindell, right? I think there is a wider area where these things have taken root.

And so, beyond the question of whether or not it helps him in the election, I think it’s a really important story about trust in institutions.

COLLINS: Yeah, even people who don’t go to Trump rallies, or maybe what used to be described as country club Republicans are really into it, which is why when he says things like — I understand that he’s saying all the time and so it falls on deaf ears sometimes, but to hear him say it the way he said it today, that he shouldn’t have left the White House the way he really is – I mean, he is, that’s not never happened before this.

CUPP: No. And it’s really a reminder at the worst possible time of the kind of chaos and stuff that has spurned the voters he needs to drag him across the finish line. And for the Iowa poll, I mean, look, if the Iowa poll is anything to go by, the tracker is that we’re not going to have a long election week, okay? If that’s true, and Trump is doing so well, or Kamala is doing so well in Iowa, it’s not going to last as long as we think it is.

But there are these pockets of voters in the seven swing states that we just don’t know what they’re going to do. They tell us, right, Kamala has these ghost voters, these young college-age women who haven’t voted before. So we don’t know who they are yet, but they say they plan to vote for Kamala. With the youth vote, you never know if they will actually show up. That’s it for her.

There are pockets in Pennsylvania’s steel towns of Hispanic men who say they plan to vote for Trump. Will they? Will they pull the lever for Trump? Has the fiasco in Puerto Rico changed its mind? Because many of them are mainland Puerto Rican voters. We don’t know.

So even when the voters tell us what indicates what they intend to do, there are so many of these phantom pockets for both candidates in the battleground states, we just can’t, we just can’t tell.

COLLINS: Yes. It’s remarkable to see how close it is in The New York Times. But even if this poll is wrong in Iowa, if she doesn’t win Iowa, but even if it’s within the eight-point margin of error, she says women, over 65, 63 percent for Harris, 28 percent for Trump , even if this is off by 10 percent, that’s still striking for Iowa. Women overall in Iowa, Harris, 56 percent, Trump, 36 percent.

When I talk about the punch inside the Trump campaign, it’s not the overall numbers. Are the numbers with women, because they are the way women feel in Wisconsin and Michigan and the other states we rely on?