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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 by 3 percentage points in Iowa.
Trump won the state by double digits, a difference that his lawyers argue in the suit constitutes “election-interfering fiction.” Trump 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 Monday.
Selzer announced after the election that she would stop polling political contests and move into other ventures.
When the Register published the Selzer poll, Trump had been widely expected to win the state. The survey of 808 likely Iowa voters found Harris with 47% support to Trump’s 44%.
“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,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
Shortly before the poll’s release, a possible leak predicted its findings, prompting an internal probe.
A spokesperson for the 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,” said the spokesperson, Lark-Marie Anton. “We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit.”
Selzer declined to comment.
The lawsuit is the latest front in Trump’s campaign against coverage by the media and analysts that he claims are 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. Trump is also pursuing legal action against the Pulitzer Prize Board after it awarded prizes for stories about Russia and his 2016 campaign.
Media law experts were skeptical the suit could achieve its aims in court but said it could have a chilling effect on the media.
“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 says “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 trying to influence political races in favor of Democrats and says her large platform offers “a significant and impactful opportunity to deceive voters.”
Rick Hasen, an election law expert at UCLA School of Law, quickly dismissed the lawsuit.
“I don’t expect this lawsuit to go anywhere,” he wrote on his blog.
Katherine Doyle is a White House reporter for NBC News.
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