… When Homer wrote of his hero Odysseus, he was “that godlike man.” The D.C. poets use the same laudatory epithet-style when they sing of Selzer; she is uniformly “the great” or “most respected” or, as I saw on a book jacket recently while walking through the Des Moines airport, “Iowa’s ‘polling queen.’”
It’s a reputation that is not unearned: She has on more than one occasion foretold an outcome that no one else saw coming, been pilloried for it, and not budged — the polling Cassandra of Des Moines. And her rise has come at a show-me-a-hero time in polling, as the industry rapidly loses its grip on what has made it tick for so many years: Landline calls are fewer and farther between, and Internet polls might be the wave of the future. Which is why this one question seems so pressing: What makes Ann Selzer so good? CONT.
Clare Malone, FiveThirtyEight
See also: The Iowa Poll and the 2004 Caucuses by J. Ann Selzer