President-elect Trump filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register and its pollster, alleging “brazen election interference” due to a pre-election survey showing Democrat Kamala Harris with a three-percentage-point lead in Iowa.
Gannett Co., the Register’s parent company, dismissed the lawsuit as baseless on Tuesday, vowing to defend its First Amendment rights.
This lawsuit is part of the President-elect’s ongoing actions against media outlets he believes have treated him unfairly. This weekend, ABC News reportedly donated to a Trump presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos for falsely claiming Trump was civilly liable for rape.
The Des Moines Register poll, conducted by now-retired pollster J. Ann Selzer, was surprising because it indicated that Trump’s earlier lead in the traditionally Republican state had vanished. Trump ultimately won Iowa by over 13 percentage points.
The lawsuit stated, “There was a perfectly good reason nobody saw this coming: because a three-point lead for Harris in deep-red Iowa was not reality. It was election-interfering fiction.”
Trump claims the poll boosted Democrat morale, forced Republicans to reallocate campaign resources, and misled the public about the Democrats’ actual standing.
Filed late Monday in Iowa’s Polk County district court, the lawsuit cites Iowa consumer fraud law. It doesn’t specify monetary damages but seeks a jury trial to award triple the actual damages.
Regardless of the legal outcome, the case could have broader implications. Trump’s legal filing aims to deter “radicals from continuing to act with corrupt intent in releasing polls manufactured for the purpose of skewing election results in favor of Democrats.”
Lark-Marie Anton, a Des Moines Register spokeswoman, acknowledged the pre-election poll didn’t accurately predict Trump’s victory margin, stating that the newspaper published the data and a technical explanation.
“We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe a lawsuit would be without merit,” she said.
Selzer did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, she told Iowa PBS last week that manipulating polls for specific results is against her ethics, and she questioned the motives behind the accusations against her.
“To suggest without a single shred of evidence that I was in cahoots with somebody, I was being paid by somebody, it’s all just kind of, it’s hard to pay too much attention to it except that they are accusing me of a crime,” she said.
—Associated Press correspondents Tom Beaumont in Des Moines and Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska contributed to this report.
