President-elect Trump Sues Des Moines Register, Pollster

DES MOINES, Iowa — President-elect Donald Trump sued the Des Moines Register and its longtime contract pollster J. Ann Selzer on Monday over a poll released just days before Election Day that suggested Vice President Kamala Harris had a decisive lead in Iowa.

That poll, which showed Harris leading Trump by 3 percentage points in a state he swept just 10 months before during the Republican Iowa Caucus, sent shockwaves across the media landscape in the waning days of the 2024 campaign.

The shockwaves continued to resonate — and grew perhaps even louder — on election night, when Trump won the state handily, by 14 percentage points.

The gaping, 17-percentage point miss seemed inexplicable given the Des Moines Register’s reputation for consistently doing some of the nation’s best political reporting.

In his lawsuit, which was filed in the state court in Polk County, Iowa, Trump accuses the newspaper and  pollster Selzer of engaging in deliberate deception in violation of the state’s consumer fraud laws.

“Selzer’s polling ‘miss’ was not an astonishing coincidence — it was intentional,” Trump’s attorneys claim.

The filing of the lawsuit comes just days after the president-elect settled his defamation lawsuit against ABC, with the network agreeing to contribute $15 million to his presidential foundation and library.

Its filing also occurred just after a press conference at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, at which he said, “We have to straighten out our press.”

“Our press is very corrupt, almost as corrupt as our elections,” Trump told the reporters who gathered for his first post-election news briefing.

In his lawsuit Trump asserts: “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,”  the lawsuit says.

Trump is seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, as well as an order barring the pollster from releasing “any further deceptive polls.”

He also wants to know exactly what data the pollster scrutinized before releasing it to the Des Moines Register.

The Iowa poll was started in December 1943 as a public service intended, the newspaper’s editors said, to allow each resident of Iowa to observe “what the people of this state as a whole are thinking.”

In early November, the Des Moines Register published an editorial describing Selzer’s efforts to determine why the poll differed so widely from the actual vote.

The pollster’s review, the paper said, “has taken the form of testing plausible theories against available data. To date, no likely single culprit has emerged to explain the wide disparity.”

Selzer, who has conducted the poll since 1998 and had previously announced that 2024 would be her last go-around, first looked at the poll’s demographic data, seeing if it weighed more heavily in favor of the state’s 1st Congressional district and cities, which tend to lean more Democratic than other parts of the state.

This, she found, did not happen.

Selzer then checked to see if the poll’s weighting was flawed, but here the weighting was minimal and equal to other recent Iowa polls.

The pollsters also sought to address suggestions that she failed to detect a shift among men of color toward Trump. In fact, the poll’s sample of Latino men showed the group going to Trump by a 4-1 margin.

“But the numbers are so small they had little effect on the overall poll results,” the newspaper said in November.

One factor that may have contributed to some extent was the number of voters who said they voted for Biden in 2020.

Selzer found the poll included more self-identified 2020 Biden voters than would seem to be proportionate, but she said voters’ recollections of their past votes tend not to be highly reliable.

As part of her review, Selzer tested the recalled vote that respondents reported for this poll compared to the actual Iowa vote in 2020. The findings suggest a 6-point lead for Trump in 2024, but still far from Trump’s actual 13-point victory. 

Some potential  factors are unknowable from the data, such as whether the poll may have missed blocs of voters amid growing distrust of polling

Following the Register’s long practice, it released the poll questionnaire at the same time that the poll was released. For transparency, it later released the poll’s full demographics, crosstabs and weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from Selzer detailing her review.

Trump’s lawsuit names Selzer, her polling company, the Des Moines Register and Gannett, the paper’s parent company, as defendants.

In a written statement, Lark-Marie Anton, a Gannett spokesperson, said:

“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,” 

“We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit,” Anton added.

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