President-elect Donald Trump is suing the Des Moines Register and its leading pollster, J. Ann Selzer, for “brazen election interference” and fraud over a presidential election poll that showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading in Iowa.
“I’m doing this not because I want to, I’m doing this because I feel I have an obligation to. I’m gonna be bringing [a lawsuit] against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, who had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time, and just before the election said I was going to lose by 3 or 4 points,” Trump said. “It became the biggest story all over the world because I was gonna win Iowa by 20 points. The farmers love me, and I love the farmers. And it was interesting the way she did it, she brought it down two weeks before, said I was only gonna win by 4. That was a big story. But that was good because she brought it down from like 22 points to 4, or whatever the number was. Way up, an easy win. We never even thought to go there.”
“In my opinion, it was fraud, and it was election interference. You know, she’s got me right always,” he added, “She’s a very good pollster. She knows what she was doing.”
The lawsuit, first reported by Fox News, seeks “accountability for brazen election interference committed by” the Des Moines Register (DMR) and Selzer “in favor of now-defeated former Democrat candidate Kamala Harris through use of a leaked and manipulated Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll conducted by Selzer and S&C and published by DMR and Gannett in the Des Moines Register on Nov. 2, 2024.”
Trump’s attorneys are suing under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, alleging that the defendants took part in an unfair act because the poll “caused substantial, unavoidable injury to consumers that was not outweighed by any consumer or competitive benefits which the practice produced.”
Consumers were further misled “as to the actual position of the respective candidates in the Iowa Presidential race.”
Selzer wrote in an opinion piece for the Des Moines Register that she received messages asking why she “manipulated” data to show a Harris lead.
“In response to a critique that I ‘manipulated’ the data, or had been paid (by some anonymous source, presumably on the Democratic side), or that I was exercising psyops or some sort of voter suppression: I told more than one news outlet that the findings from this last poll could actually energize and activate Republican voters who thought they would likely coast to victory. Maybe that’s what happened,” she wrote.
