President-elect Donald Trump sued the Des Moines Register and J. Ann Selzer for “brazen election interference” on Monday after the vaunted pollster’s wildly inaccurate prediction three days before the 2024 election that Vice President Kamala Harris would trounce her Republican opponent in Iowa.
Trump’s lawyers filed the suit seeking damages in state district court in Polk County, Iowa, claiming Selzer and the Des Moines-based outlet interfered in the election “in favor of” the Democratic nominee “through use of a leaked and manipulated” poll.
The Nov. 2 survey showed Trump, 78, lagging behind Harris, 60, by three percentage points, 47% to 44%, which spurred pundits and politicos to speculate the vice president would win a clean sweep in the 2024 contest, since Iowa went for Trump by nearly 10 percentage points in 2016 and around eight points in 2020.
“President Trump ultimately won Iowa by over thirteen points,” the lawsuit boasts, a 16-point swing from Selzer’s pre-election finding.
Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and other party operatives purportedly leaked the flawed findings hours before the Iowa poll dropped — a move that Trump’s legal team argued was done “for maximum ‘shock and awe’ political impact rather than accuracy or reliability” to do “as much harm to the electoral process as possible.”
Media allies also seized on Harris rocketing into the lead position — with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow praising Selzer as a “living bull’s-eye” for her predictive powers — but the famed pollster announced her retirement less than two weeks later.
“Selzer’s polling ‘miss’ was not an astonishing coincidence — it was intentional,” the suit states. “As President Trump observed: ‘She knew exactly what she was doing.’”
“Further, this action is necessary to deter Defendants and their fellow radicals from continuing to act with corrupt intent in releasing polls manufactured for the purpose of skewing election results in favor of Democrats,” it adds, referencing Harris’ “fatal weaknesses as a candidate,” her “lack of appeal to critical swaths of the traditional Democrat base” and “[h]er incessant use of ‘word salads.’”
Selzer’s polling firm, Selzer & Company, and the parent company of the Des Moines Register, Gannett, were also targeted as part of the lawsuit for also violating the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act with the poll, according to the legal filing, which was first reported by Fox News.
“Millions of Americans, including Plaintiff, residents of Iowa, and Iowans who contributed to President Trump’s Campaign and its affiliated entities (the ‘Trump 2024 Campaign’), were deceived by the doctored Harris Poll,” the filing declares.
It also cites past Selzer polls that allegedly tried to boost other Democratic candidates — including a survey favoring incumbent Tom Miller over GOP candidate Brenna Bird in the 2022 Iowa attorney general’s race that turned out to be 18 percentage points off. Bird beat Miller 50.9% to 49.1%.
The suit comes one day after Trump announced during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago residence that he would be suing the Des Moines Register and Selzer.
It also comes on the heels of ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos reaching a settlement over a defamation lawsuit with Trump over the weekend, which resulted in the network paying $15 million to a “presidential foundation and museum” that Trump will establish.
“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,” said Des Moines Register spokesperson Lark-Marie Anton in a statement. “We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit.”
Selzer declined to comment.
