J. Ann Selzer appears on the program “Iowa Press” Dec. 13, 2024. (Screenshot courtesy of Iowa PBS)
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Donald Trump filed a lawsuit this week against J. Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register, claiming their final pre-election poll that said Kamala Harris led by 3 points in Iowa amounted to election interference. Dubbing it the “Harris poll,” the president-elect makes this claim:
“Defendants engaged in “deception” because the Harris Poll was “likely to mislead a substantial number of consumers as to a material fact or facts,” to wit: the actual position of the respective candidates in the Iowa Presidential race.”
Are we sure he’s not talking about Kim Reynolds?
Consider the evidence. In November 2023, Reynolds endorsed Ron DeSantis and made this bold statement about Trump: “I believe he can’t win.”
Then, after saying the media would shift and go after Trump, she was even more declarative: “He can’t win.”
Reynolds, the highly influential Iowa governor, endorsed DeSantis two months before the Iowa Caucuses, and she badly wanted him to win the 2024 election. Republicans said that the country was sinking fast under Joe Biden, and winning was pivotal.
Reynolds not only praised DeSantis’ record as governor of Florida, but she made clear that if Republicans wanted to get Biden and the Democrats out of the White House, Trump wasn’t the guy the GOP should choose to run.
Reynolds was no ordinary pundit. When she talked, people listened. Eight out of 10 Iowa Republicans who planned to caucus approved of her. The year before, she won reelection by nearly 19 points.
The Register even published a story in which the state Republican chair said if anybody could anoint a winner in Iowa, it was Reynolds. So, the governor’s proclamation clearly carried weight.
Except there was plenty of evidence that Trump could win — that, in fact, he might actually be winning already.
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A New York Times poll published the day before her proclamation said Trump actually led Biden in five of six battleground states.
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An Emerson College poll from October said Trump led Biden by 2 points.
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On the same day Reynolds said Trump couldn’t win, an ABC News article said that national polling averages showed Trump and Biden were “currently neck-and-neck.”
Yet, Reynolds insisted to Iowans that Trump would lose.
Was she being honest?
You can judge for yourself, but had Trump filed a lawsuit against Reynolds, his attorneys might have said that she, too, misled “a substantial number of (voters) as to a material fact or facts,’ to wit: the actual position of the respective candidates in the presidential race.”
But Trump isn’t suing Reynolds. He’s suing Selzer, the Register and its parent company, Gannett.
Trump’s suit cites a consumer fraud statute in the Iowa code that pertains to the “advertisement, sale, or lease of consumer merchandise.” Trump makes the tenuous claim that “merchandise” includes the Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll.
But as the legal scholar Eugene Volokh wrote, “the First Amendment generally bars states from imposing liability for misleading or even outright false political speech, including in commercially distributed newspapers — and especially for predictive and evaluative judgments of the sort inherent in estimating public sentiment about a candidate.” (I suppose that would let Reynolds off the hook, too.)
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds appeared on stage with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who she officially endorsed for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. (Photo by Robin Opsahl/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
The Register says it believes the Trump lawsuit is without merit.
As for Selzer, last week she said on Iowa PBS, “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.”
Anybody who knows or has followed Selzer’s work knows that her goal is to get it right, not to pick a side. And in many cases, she did get it right. Which is why, despite the allegations in Trump’s lawsuit, unbiased poll evaluators have highly rated her work.
I believe the saddest thing about this suit is that top Republicans in Iowa know in their hearts that Trump’s claim is not true, yet out of fear or dishonor they remain silent. They know that measuring the status of the electorate is incredibly difficult, and that some of the polls done in this state are dreck.
They know Selzer is different, that she has had an enviable track record of finding trends before others do.
How many Iowa Republicans, do you suppose, fearfully asked themselves after the poll was released: Could this be true? Could she be right? Could we have missed something?
More than a few, I’ll bet.
There is no deception here. Not on the part of Selzer, the Des Moines Register — or Reynolds.
Here is the truth: Selzer’s poll was wrong. Badly so. But then, Reynolds was wrong, too.
The irony in this is that even though Selzer and the Register are the ones who are being sued, they weren’t the ones trying to defeat Donald Trump. But Reynolds was.
This column was originally published by Ed Tibbetts’ Along the Mississippi newsletter on Substack. It is republished here through the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative.
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