President-elect Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register on Monday in his latest legal swipe against the media.
The suit filed in Iowa’s Polk County—which also names Gannett, the parent company of the Register, and Selzer’s polling company as defendants—claims they engaged in “brazen election interference” with a poll published on the eve of the 2024 presidential election, according to Fox News Digital.
The Nov. 2 poll surprisingly indicated that Vice President Kamala Harris had a three percentage point lead over Trump in Iowa, a state which the Republican was widely expected to win.
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Trump did, in fact, win the state by a margin of over 13 percentage points. According to the incoming president’s lawsuit, the large discrepancy between the poll’s prediction and the actual outcome was not simply due to issues with the poll’s methodology.
“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,” the lawsuit states, according to CNN. “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.”
The lawsuit alleges the defendants violated the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, which outlaws deceptive advertising.
Selzer declined the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
“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 for the Register, told the Daily Beast in a statement. “We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit.”
Some media law experts were also dismissive of the filing. “I don’t expect this lawsuit to go anywhere,” wrote Rick Hasen, an election law expert at UCLA School of Law, in response to the case. Clay Calvert, a media law expert and professor at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, similarly said its odds of success “are slim to none,” but winning the case in court wasn’t necessarily the point.
“The true motivation is to intimidate the press and journalists,” Calvert told NBC News. “I unfortunately suspect this lawsuit is just a harbinger of things to come.”
On Monday, while announcing his intention to sue Selzer and the Register, Trump said: “I’m not doing this because I want to, I’m doing this because I feel I have an obligation to.”
The filing comes after ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump. The network and its star anchor George Stephanopoulos also expressed “regret” about on-air statements he’d made in March while referring to Trump’s legal battle against writer E. Jean Carroll.
Stephanopoulos said Trump had been found “liable for rape,” though a civil jury in Manhattan in 2023 actually found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll rather than rape.
The judge overseeing the case later clarified that owing to the way rape is narrowly defined in New York law, the verdict did not mean Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
