President-elect Donald Trump filed suit on Monday night against the Des Moines Register newspaper and veteran Iowa pollster J Ann Selzer over a pre-election poll that showed Vice President Kamala Harris beating Trump in a state he easily carried just days later.
Trump is alleging the November 2 poll that had Harris 3 percentage points ahead of him amounted to “brazen election interference” and contained “leaked” and “manipulated” data. Filed in Polk County, Iowa, under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, the lawsuit seeks an order preventing Selzer from releasing “any further deceptive polls” as well as unspecified damages.
Trump’s lawyers, in a filing first reported by Fox News Digital, accused the “defendants and their cohorts in the Democrat Party” of hoping “the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election.”
The president-elect had teased possible legal action against the newspaper and pollster during a press conference on Monday, where he labeled the poll’s publication a “fraud” while also praising Selzer for her past accurate surveys.
Trump’s lawsuit names as defendants the Register; its parent company, Gannett, which owns USA Today; and Selzer and her polling firm, Selzer & Company. Selzer did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday, but the Register defended its decision to publish the outlier poll.
“We have acknowledged that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll did not reflect the ultimate margin of President Trump’s Election Day victory in Iowa by releasing the poll’s full demographics, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer. We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit,” Des Moines Register spokesperson Lark-Marie Anton said in a statement.
This week’s legal action is the latest escalation of the president-elect’s battle against the news media as he gears up to return to the White House. Last month, Trump sued CBS over its 60 Minutes interview with Harris, alleging the sit-down was edited to portray her more positively. ABC News over the weekend reached a $15 million settlement with Trump over his defamation suit against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos. ABC will also pay $1 million toward Trump’s legal fees and issue an apology.
Trump’s Iowa suit, if successful, could have a chilling effect on the polling industry, though experts are sceptical that it will succeed. “I don’t expect this lawsuit to go anywhere,” election law expert Rick Hasan of the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law wrote Monday night.
The final Iowa Poll, from a pollster who had long been considered the first-in-the-nation presidential caucus state’s “gold standard,” sharply deviated from the election outcome in the traditionally red state. Selzer last week vehemently denied tweaking her data to sway the election. “They’re saying that this was election interference, which is a crime. So, the idea that I intentionally set up to deliver this response, when I’ve never done that before — I’ve had plenty of opportunities to do it — it’s not my ethic,” she said.
The suit accuses Selzer, who has shared polling crosstabs and other data undergirding the results, and the newspaper of orchestrating the poll’s outcome to benefit Harris — who ultimately lost every swing state and the popular vote to Trump.
Trump’s lawyers claimed that “left-wing pollsters have attempted to influence electoral outcomes through manipulated polls that have unacceptable error rates and are not grounded in widely accepted polling methodologies.”
And they took specific aim at Selzer: “As Selzer knows, this type of manipulation creates a narrative of inevitability for Democrat candidates, increases enthusiasm among Democrats, compels Republicans to divert campaign time and money to areas in which they are ahead, and deceives the public into believing that Democrat candidates are performing better than they really are.”
