Trump Sues Des Moines Register, Pollster Over Brazen Election Interference

President-elect Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit accusing a newspaper and a polling firm of engaging in “brazen election interference” by publishing a pre-election survey that downplayed his popularity.

The lawsuit, filed late Monday, targets The Des Moines Register newspaper, its parent company Gannett, and pollster Ann Selzer. Trump claims they intentionally underestimated his support in a poll that showed him trailing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

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The November 2 poll, which indicated Harris leading Trump by three percentage points in Iowa, garnered significant attention, as Trump had easily won the state in both the 2016 and 2020 elections.

Trump went on to win Iowa in last month’s election by more than 13 percentage points.

The lawsuit, filed in Polk County, Iowa, argues that “Selzer’s polling ‘miss’ was not an astonishing coincidence – it was intentional.” Trump added, “She knew exactly what she was doing.”

The legal action cites alleged violations of Iowa’s consumer fraud law and seeks triple the damages as determined by a jury.

Lark-Marie Anton, a spokesperson for The Des Moines Register, defended the newspaper’s reporting and called the lawsuit “without merit.”

“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, cross-tabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer,” Anton said.

Selzer has not yet responded to a request for comment but mentioned in a PBS interview last week that she was puzzled by any suggestion that she intentionally designed the poll to produce a specific outcome.

Trump’s lawsuit comes shortly after ABC News reached a settlement in a defamation case he filed regarding anchor George Stephanopoulos’s erroneous claim that he had been found civilly liable for rape.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil liberties organization, criticized the lawsuit as a “direct assault” on the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech.

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“If newspapers and polling firms are sued for ‘deceptive practices’ because they publish stories and poll results politicians don’t like, every media outlet’s First Amendment rights are threatened. Getting a poll wrong is not election interference or fraud,” the group said.

Trump, who is also suing CBS News over an interview with Harris that he alleges was misleadingly edited, faces significant legal challenges in his lawsuits due to the strong speech protections in the US, which are among the most robust globally.

Nevertheless, these lawsuits could pose challenges for news organizations by revealing potentially embarrassing internal communications and subjecting journalists and executives to depositions.

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