WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is suing Ann Selzer, her polling firm, The Des Moines Register and the newspaper’s parent company, Gannett, accusing them of consumer fraud, according to a copy of the filing reviewed by NBC News.
The suit, filed Monday night in Polk County, Iowa, says it seeks “accountability for brazen election interference” over a Nov. 2 poll that showed Kamala Harris up 3 percentage points in Iowa.
Trump ultimately won the state by double digits, a difference that his lawyers argue in the suit constitutes “election-interfering fiction.” The president-elect is making the claim under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, which prohibits deceptive advertising.
“I’m doing this because I feel I have an obligation to. 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 3 or 4 points,” Trump said in discussing the suit on Monday.
Selzer announced after the election that she would stop polling political contests and move into other ventures.
A spokesperson for the Des Moines Register said the newspaper stands by its reporting.
“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,” the spokesperson, Lark-Marie Anton, said. “We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit.”
Selzer did not immediately return a request for comment.
Media law experts were skeptical the suit could have much success.
“The odds of success here are slim to none, but winning in court is not likely the real goal of this lawsuit,” said Clay Calvert, a media law expert and professor at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law. “The true motivation is to intimidate the press and journalists. I unfortunately suspect this lawsuit is just a harbinger of things to come.”
The suit states that “Millions of Americans, including Plaintiff, residents of Iowa, and Iowans who contributed to President Trump’s Campaign and its affiliated entities (the “Trump 2024 Campaign”), were deceived by the doctored Harris Poll” and that the “polling ‘miss’ was not an astonishing coincidence — it was intentional.”
It attacks Selzer’s reputation as a standard-bearing pollster, alleging that the polling miss showing Harris with a lead in Iowa that never materialized was intended to sway the race. The suit argues a pattern by Selzer of attempting to influence political races in favor of Democrats and that her large platform offers “a significant and impactful opportunity to deceive voters.”
The suit is the latest front in Trump’s campaign against coverage by the media and analysts that he perceives as biased.
Trump secured a $15 million payout from ABC News, plus the payment of his lawyer’s fees, totaling $1 million, in a defamation case over the weekend.
Rick Hasen, an election law expert at UCLA School of Law, immediately dismissed the lawsuit.
“I don’t expect this lawsuit to go anywhere,” he wrote on his blog.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
