President-elect Donald Trump said on Monday he is suing the Des Moines Register and its top pollster Ann Selzer for “election interference” over its poll just before the 2024 election showing Vice President Kamala Harris ahead by 3 percentage points. Trump went on to win Iowa by more than 13 percentage points.
“I’m going to be bringing one against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time.”
“And then, just before the election, she said I was going to lose by three or four points, and it became the biggest story all over the world because I was going to win Iowa by 20 points,” he continued. “And in my opinion, it was fraud, and it was election interference. You know, she’s gotten me right always. She’s a very good pollster. She knows what she was doing.”
MORE: Trump specifically notes their "parent" - which is the USA Today Network - in announcing the lawsuit.
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) December 16, 2024
To give everybody some context - the odds of a legit poll being wrong by 16 points is basically 0. Selzer was supposedly the "gold standard."
Democrats like Illinois…
The lawsuit was filed Monday night in Polk County, Iowa under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act and related provisions. It says it 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." The lawsuit is also against the parent company of the Des Moines Register, Gannett, which also owns other publications, including USA Today. [...]
Trump attorneys said Selzer’s prediction of Harris’ three point lead in "deep-red Iowa was not reality, it was election-interfering fiction."
Trump attorneys said Selzer had "prided herself on a mainstream reputation for accuracy despite several far less publicized egregious polling misses in favor of Democrats" and said she "would have the public believe it was merely a coincidence that one of the worst polling misses of her career came just days before the most consequential election in memory, was leaked and happened to go against the Republican candidate."
"The Harris Poll was no ‘miss’ but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election," the lawsuit states, adding that "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." (Fox News)
Selzer, who announced her retirement less than two weeks after the polling debacle, has disputed claims the survey was election interference.
"They're saying that this was election interference, which is a crime," she said during a discussion at the Iowa Press. "So, the idea that I intentionally set up to deliver this response, when I've never done that before, I've had plenty of opportunities to do it, it's not my ethic."
