Donald Trump announced Monday he would sue political pollster Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register, who published a shock poll showing Trump losing Iowa by three points.
“I’m not doing this because I want to, I’m doing this because I feel I have an obligation to,” the president-elect said.
Trump’s announcement comes on the heels of a victorious defamation suit against ABC News. The network’s star anchor, George Stephanopoulos, said multiple times Trump was found “liable for rape,” when he was actually found liable for sexual abuse. As a result, ABC will contribute $15 million to Trump’s future presidential library.
“The people in Iowa, their newspaper had a very, very good pollster who got it right all the time,” Trump said. “Then just before the election, she said I was going to lose by four points and it became the biggest story of all time, all over the world.”
Selzer predicted in a poll three days before the election that Kamala Harris would top Trump 47 percent to 44 percent because of older women showing out to vote for reproductive rights. The poll gave Democrats false hope that Harris would win the White House decisively. Ultimately, Trump won Iowa by 13 points.
Trump blasted the poll in a post on Truth Social at the time.
“In fact, it’s not even close! All polls, except for one heavily skewed toward the Democrats by a Trump hater who called it totally wrong the last time, have me up, BY A LOT,” he wrote.
Selzer, who had an A+ rating for accuracy, first broke onto the scene as Iowa’s top pollster when she correctly predicted Barack Obama winning the Iowa caucuses over Hillary Clinton in 2008. She announced in a column after the 2024 election that she’d be retiring from polling.
“Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with election day results? Of course,” she wrote. “It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Trump for comment but did not hear back in time of publication.
