In his latest move to push back against the media that he says has wronged him, President-elect Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against an Iowa pollster and newspaper that he says intentionally skewed a poll against him to help Vice President Kamala Harris win the election in November.
A legal expert said the lawsuit had little chance of success, and press freedom advocates protested it as yet another retaliatory measure designed to prevent news outlets from making a fair assessment of the new president, especially after other Trump lawsuits against media institutions such as CBS News and ABC News and the board that oversees the Pulitzer Prizes.
ABC News agreed last week to pay $15 million to Trump's presidential library to settle a lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos' inaccurate claim on the show that the president-elect was civilly liable for the rape of writer E. Jean Carroll had been.
Some of Trump's supporters welcomed the Iowa lawsuit, backing his claim that pollster J. Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register intended to influence the election outcome, despite providing no evidence of wrongdoing or collusion to favor the Democratic presidential nominee.
Trump's lawyers filed suit on Monday in state court in Polk County, home of the state capital Des Moines and the Register, Iowa's leading newspaper. The president-elect had announced the action in a press conference earlier in the day, saying: “In my opinion it was fraud and election interference.”
“Defendants and their supporters in the Democratic Party hoped that the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 presidential election,” Trump’s lawsuit says.
Selzer and her polling institute are named as defendants in the lawsuit; the Des Moines Register; and Gannett, one of America's largest newspaper chains and owner of USA Today. While Trump accuses other media outlets of defamation, the Iowa lawsuit alleges violations of the state's Consumer Fraud Act, which prohibits deception in the advertising or sale of goods.
Selzer did not immediately respond to the lawsuit. But inside Interviews after the election She and election analysts familiar with her work rejected Republican conspiracy theories.
Gannett released a statement acknowledging that the latest poll in Iowa did not reflect the final result. It showed Harris leading by three percentage points and Trump winning Iowa by more than 13 points. The statement described the extensive background data the pollster had released about the conduct of the survey.
“We stand by our reporting on this matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit,” the statement said.
Selzer has been one of Iowa's most trusted pollsters for decades. Their polls have been watched nationwide by journalists and politicians of both parties for their accuracy, particularly in the run-up to the primaries seen as crucial to presidential politics.
Selzer's final poll for the Register before the 2020 vote showed then-President Trump leading former Vice President Joe Biden by seven percentage points. That turned out to be very accurate: Trump won the state by just over 8 percentage points.
Ahead of last month's vote, Selzer & Co.'s poll for the Register produced a result that had veteran pollsters and other observers admitting they were surprised. It showed Harris had a 47% to 44% advantage over Trump among likely voters, in a state the Republican easily held in the previous two elections.
The poll's release the week before the election encouraged Democrats as it was a possible sign that Harris had momentum not only in Iowa but potentially in other key battleground states in the Midwest. Republicans expressed doubts about the poll's accuracy.
Pollsters regularly remind the public that their polls are only snapshots and are not necessarily good for predicting election results. They also urge voters not to use poll results in a single state to extrapolate to other states, which inevitably have different electoral dynamics and demographic makeup.
Still, the Selzer poll's miss of more than 16 percentage points was so large that the pollster admitted she was disturbed by it and was racking her brains for explanations. In recent interviews, Selzer expressed dismay and continued confusion.
In an interview, she described how she and her team scrutinized the survey results and found no warning signs of a misstep. Some internal indicators of the composition of the sample appeared to favor Trump, as it included more rural voters and fewer young people than were expected to cast ballots.
The pollster said it was possible she used too strict a “screen” to weed out voters she thought were unlikely to vote. But she said critics have accused her of something much worse.
“They're saying it was election interference, which is a crime,” she said during a panel discussion last week. “The idea that I have brought to my mind to provide this answer, even though I have never done it before – I have had many opportunities to do so – is not in keeping with my ethics.
“But without a shred of evidence to say that I was in cahoots with someone, that I was paid by someone – it's all kind of… hard to pay too much attention to that other than they're accusing me of a crime.”
One thing both sides of the furore agree on is that the poll results in Iowa received a lot of media attention. Selzer speculated in the interview last week that the finding that Trump was trailing Harris may actually have persuaded more of his voters to turn out in Iowa.
“Maybe something happened between the close of voting on Thursday night and Election Day,” she said. “Contrary to what has been alleged, it may be that the release of this (poll) galvanized Republicans even further and … resulted in the Trump vote actually being inflated.”
However, she admitted that there was no evidence to support this speculation. “I don’t have the data for that,” she said.
Selzer also mentioned previous cases in which her poll results reflected election victory and one case in which this was not the case.
In 1988, their poll showed Democrat Michael Dukakis with a large lead over Vice President George H. W. Bush, a result that also contradicted conventional wisdom. Register journalists even debated whether to publish the finding. They did, and Dukakis won the state by more than 10 percentage points, just as Selzer's poll predicted.
By contrast, Selzer's 2004 poll showed Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) with a slim lead over President George W. Bush before the election. But Bush won by less than one percentage point. Selzer recalled that Iowa's Republican Gov. Terry Branstad later told her that the poll helped encourage more Republicans to vote.
In his press conference in Florida on Monday, Trump acknowledged Selzer's positive reputation. His conclusion seemed to be that such a skilled pollster couldn't have been so wrong if she hadn't intended to favor his opponent.
“You know, she always really understood me. She’s a very good pollster,” Trump said. “She knows what she did.”
Election law expert Rick Hasen wrote on his blog: “I don’t expect this lawsuit to go anywhere.”
In an interview, Hasen pointed out that in defamation cases involving public figures, plaintiffs are required to prove “actual malice.” He said he expects that standard to be used in Iowa, even if state law doesn't specifically list it.
“This is a 1st Amendment activity, a speech activity, and therefore it is protected,” he said. “You and the survey publishers are protected.”
Hasen predicted that Trump's lawyers would face more hurdles.
“It does not appear that there was a false statement. And there is no evidence that the pollster intentionally manipulated the results,” he said. “Furthermore, it is not clear whether this (state) law applies to something like a survey, as opposed to a consumer product, or to the typical protection of consumers from bad products or lies about products.”
As expected, much of the reaction to the lawsuit was party political.
“She was not involved in any conspiracy, there was no conspiracy. She was just wrong,” progressive commentator Cenk Uygur wrote on X. “So can Hillary (Clinton) sue all the pollsters who said she would beat Trump? And more importantly, can all the slimy politicians now sue anyone who criticizes them or even runs a poll that shows them losing?”
One Trump loyalist, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, released a compilation of a series of pre-election polls that largely showed Harris with a narrow lead over Trump.
“Meaningful data,” Flynn wrote. “Clearly shows how organized surveys are intended to influence rather than inform.”
“I hope it doesn't have a chilling effect on news gathering, but it could,” said Barbara Kingsley-Wilson, a lecturer and media consultant in the Department of Journalism and Public Relations at Cal State Long Beach. “It is a financially difficult time for journalism organizations in general, and the well-heeled forces seeking to bully and intimidate know this.”
She said she would advise student journalists to “be thorough and fair and not be intimidated by threats of unfounded lawsuits.”