President-elect Trump sued the Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer on Monday over a poll released just before Election Day indicating Vice President Harris had a sizable lead in Iowa.
The poll found Harris leading Trump in Iowa by 3 percentage points days before Trump won the state by 14 percentage points as voters sent him back to the White House.
Trump’s lawsuit, which was filed in Iowa state court in Polk County, accuses the outlet and pollster of violating Iowa’s consumer fraud laws by engaging in deception.
“Selzer’s polling ‘miss’ was not an astonishing coincidence — it was intentional,” the complaint states.
The lawsuit asks for an unspecified amount of damages and an order preventing the pollster from “releasing any further deceptive polls” and compelling them to disclose information they relied upon in publishing the November survey.
The lawsuit was first reported by Fox News Digital.
“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,” the lawsuit states.
“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,” it continued.
Trump has increasingly escalated legal fights with the media, including lawsuits against ABC, CBS, journalist Bob Woodward and the Pulitzer Prize board.
The president-elect previewed that he would be filing the lawsuit over the Iowa poll at a Monday press conference, when he was asked about ABC News’s recent $15 million settlement in a defamation case Trump brought earlier this year.
“In my opinion, it was fraud, and it was election interference,” Trump said of the Iowa poll.
The lawsuit names Selzer, her polling company, the Des Moines Register and Gannett, the paper’s parent company, as defendants.
Selzer declined to comment.
“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, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer,” Lark-Marie Anton, a Des Moines Register spokesperson, said in a statement.
“We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit,” Anton added.
