President-elect Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against pollster J. Ann Selzer due to her poll in the days before the election, which absurdly showed him trailing Vice President Kamala Harris by three points in Iowa.
Trump attorneys Edward Paltzik and Alan Ostergren filed the 29-page lawsuit Monday in the Iowa District Court for Polk County, seeking a jury trial. They allege that the defendants, including Selzer, the Des Moines Register, which sponsored the poll, its parent company Gannett Co., Inc., and Tribune Company, engaged in “brazen election interference” to benefit Harris. Fox News first reported that Trump had filed the suit.
The poll, conducted October 28-31 and published November 2, days before the election, was an extreme outlier. It found Harris with a 47 percent to 44 percent edge on Trump in the former swing state, which he won comfortably in 2016 and 2020.
Every other Trump-versus-Harris poll out of Iowa and recognized by FiveThirtyEight this cycle showed Trump winning the Hawkeye State, and he ultimately carried it by a whopping 13.3 percentage points on November 5, besting his previous performances.
Trump’s lawsuit argues that Selzer, the other defendants, “and their cohorts in the Democrat Party hoped that the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election.”
Moreover, because of Selzer’s following and platform, she had “a significant and impactful opportunity to deceive voters,” the attorneys contend:
For too long, left-wing pollsters have attempted to influence electoral outcomes through manipulated polls that have unacceptable error rates and are not grounded in widely accepted polling methodologies. While Selzer is not the only pollster to engage in this corrupt practice, she had a huge platform and following and, thus, a significant and impactful opportunity to deceive voters. As Selzer knows, this type of manipulation creates a narrative of inevitability for Democrat candidates, increases enthusiasm among Democrats, compels Republicans to divert campaign time and money to areas in which they are ahead, and deceives the public into believing that Democrat candidates are performing better than they really are.
The lawsuit is being brought under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act. Trump seeks statutory damages three times the actual damages suffered, which would be determined at trial. The lawsuit also aims to compel the “defendants to disclose all information upon which they relied to engage in the deceptive and misleading acts relating to the Harris Poll.”
Speaking with reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, Trump announced he would be filing the lawsuit soon.
“That was the Des Moines Register, and it was their parent, and in my opinion, it was fraud, and it was election interference. You know, [Selzer’s] gotten me right always. She’s a very good pollster. She knows what she was doing,” Trump said.
“We’ll probably be filing a major lawsuit against them today or tomorrow,” he added.
The case is Trump v. Selzer, in the District Court for Polk County, Iowa.