President Donald Trump is not throwing in the towel on his “baseless” lawsuit against famed Iowa pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register just yet.
Trump’s legal team quietly dropped the federal suit Monday—seven months after it was filed—but quickly refiled it in an Iowa state court, potentially placing the issue in front of a more sympathetic judge.
Trump has raged at Selzer and her paper for a poll she conducted in the final days of his campaign, which showed him losing deep-red Iowa to former Vice President Kamala Harris by three percentage points.
Trump, 79, ultimately won Iowa by 13 points and carried the Electoral College 312 to 226. He won every swing state but was clearly peeved that Selzer’s poll grabbed headlines across the country, suggesting his White House return might be in peril.
No settlement was reached between Trump and Selzer, her attorneys told the Daily Beast.
Selzer is represented pro bono by The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which said in a statement that it was “reviewing next steps as we continue to defend J. Ann Selzer’s First Amendment rights.” The nonprofit had previously called the lawsuit a “creative” but “baseless” legal claim to force Selzer and the Register to defend free expression in court.
After Trump refiled his lawsuit in state court, the organization described the MAGA maneuver as an “improper” act of “procedural gamesmanship.”
A spokesperson for Gannett, which owns the Register, said an Iowa judge may deny Trump’s move to state court.
“It is clearly intended to avoid the inevitable outcome of the Des Moines Register’s motion to dismiss President Trump’s amended complaint currently pending in federal court,” the spokesperson told The Washington Post.
Selzer, 69, retired two weeks after her latest newsmaking poll turned out to be a flop. She had previously been heralded as the “gold standard” in political polling, which is partly why her shock poll garnered so much attention in November.
An election victory and the pollster’s retirement were not enough to appease Trump, however, and he sued her and the Register in December. Critics have slammed the suit, which accused the poll of violating Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act, as frivolous.
Trump’s team went on a suing spree in the early days of MAGA 2.0. Among its targets was CBS News and its program, 60 Minutes, which it sued for an eye-popping $20 billion, alleging it deceptively edited an interview of Harris to hurt him. A settlement is expected in that suit soon, but it appears likely to be for far less than Trump initially demanded.
