President-elect Donald Trump looks on during a campaign event on Dec. 19, 2023, in Waterloo, Iowa. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
President-elect Donald Trump is suing The Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer for publishing a poll that showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading in Iowa in the days before the 2024 election, claiming the poll amounted to “fraud and election interference.”
The lawsuit, filed in the Polk County District Court Monday, seeks unspecified damages and “accountability for brazen election interference” under the state’s Consumer Fraud Act. The defendants are the Register and its owner, Gannett; Selzer and Selzer & Co.
The lawsuit alleges that the poll, which showed Harris leading Trump among likely Iowa voters 47% to 44%, was published three days before the election as an attempt to “create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election.”
Trump won Iowa with 56% of the vote to Harris’ 43%. The lawsuit alleges that the Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll was not merely an inaccurate poll, but was an intentional “move with “corrupt intent” to aid Democrats.
“Selzer — who had prided herself on a mainstream reputation for accuracy despite several far less publicized egregious polling misses in favor of Democrats — … would have the public believe it was merely a coincidence that one of the worst polling misses of her career came just days before the most consequential election in memory, was leaked, and happened to go against the Republican candidate,” the lawsuit states. “The Harris Poll was no ‘miss’ but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election.”
Trump said during a Monday news conference that he was filing a lawsuit because he felt he had “an obligation to.”
“I’m going to be bringing one against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time, and then just before the election, she said I was going to lose by 3 or 4 points,” Trump said.
The president-elect also said he would likely file lawsuits against the news show “60 Minutes” as well as the Pulitzer Prize organization for giving awards to the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Selzer announced shortly after the election that she would be retiring from election polling. In an “Iowa Press” interview in aired Dec. 13, Selzer denied allegations of election interference or of intentionally releasing inaccurate results.
“They’re saying that this was election interference, which is a crime,” Selzer said. “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. But to suggest without a single shred of evidence that I was in cahoots with somebody, I was being paid by somebody, it’s all just kind of, it’s hard to pay too much attention to it except that they are accusing me of a crime.”
Lark-Marie Anton, a spokesperson for The Des Moines Register, also said in a statement that the organization believes the lawsuit is without merit.
“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,” Anton said. “We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit.”
This article first appeared in the Iowa Capital Dispatch, a sister site of the Nebraska Examiner in the States Newsroom network.
Trump-v-Selzer
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