President-elect Donald Trump made good on threats of litigation against the Des Moines Register on Monday, suing the publication and pollster J. Ann Selzer, formerly considered one of the nation’s most accurate pollsters, for “brazen election interference” in the form of a wildly inaccurate poll published three days before the election.
The poll, published by the Register on November 2, showed Vice President Kamala Harris with a three-point lead in Iowa—a state Trump went on to win by more than 13 points. Days later, Selzer suddenly retired from her polling firm, which she has run since its founding in 1996.
Trump’s lawsuit, filed in the state court in Polk County, invokes the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act and related provisions to accuse Selzer and the Register of deliberately fabricating the poll results in an effort to influence the election. Despite the almost inconceivable margin of the poll, media outlets around the country seized on the results in the run-up to the election, citing Selzer’s reputation for accuracy to boost Harris’ campaign.
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“Selzer’s polling ‘miss’ was not an astonishing coincidence — it was intentional,” the complaint states. “Defendants and their cohorts in the Democrat Party hoped that the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election. … Instead, the November 5 election was a monumental victory for President Trump in both the Electoral College and the Popular Vote, an overwhelming mandate for his America First principles, and the consignment of the radical socialist agenda to the dustbin of history.”
Trump’s legal team is asking for an unspecified amount in damages and further requesting orders to block Selzer from “releasing any further deceptive polls” and compel the Register to disclose the information that informed the inaccurate survey.
Trump’s attorneys are invoking the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act to allege that the poll results “caused substantial, unavoidable injury to consumers that was not outweighed by any consumer or competitive benefits which the practice produced.”
They also said consumers were “badly deceived and misled as to the actual position of the respective candidates in the Iowa Presidential race,” and that, “moreover, President Trump, the Trump 2024 Campaign, and other Republicans were forced to divert enormous campaign and financial resources to Iowa based on the deceptive Harris Poll.”
The filing continues:
For too long, 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.
While Selzer is not the only pollster to engage in this corrupt practice, she had a huge platform and following and, thus, a significant and impactful opportunity to deceive voters.
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.
The filing goes on to argue that the idea of a three-point Harris lead in “deep-red Iowa was not reality, it was election-interfering fiction.”
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“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,” Lark-Marie Anton, a spokesperson Gannett, the Register’s parent company, said in a statement. “We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit.”
This lawsuit comes just days after Trump reached a $15 million settlement in an unrelated defamation suit against ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos.
According to the settlement, the network will cut a check as a charitable contribution for a “Presidential foundation and museum to be established by or for Plaintiff, as Presidents of the United States of America have established in the past.”
Additionally, ABC will pay $1 million for Trump’s legal fees, allowing them to bypass a costly trial over Stephanopoulos’ repeated inaccurate claims that the then-former president had been found “liable for rape” in the E. Jean Carroll case.
The president-elect is also in the process of suing CBS News for a deceptively edited “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Harris in October.
Trump has indicated an openness to other defamation cases against media outlets that have showed overt bias against him in the past, remarking during a Monday press conference that “it costs a lot of money to do it, but we have to straighten out the press.”
Connor Walcott is the lead writer for Valuetainment.com. Follow Connor on X and look for him on VT’s “The Unusual Suspects.”
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