President-elect Trump sued the Des Moines Register and polling firm J. Ann Selzer on Monday over a poll released just before Election Day that showed Vice President Harris with a wide lead in Iowa.
Polls show Harris leading Trump by 3 points in Iowa, just days before Trump won the Hawkeye State by 14 points as voters sent her back to the White House. .
Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, filed in Iowa state court in Polk County, accuses the news organization and pollster of deceiving and violating Iowa’s consumer fraud law.
“Mr. Selzer’s polling ‘mistakes’ were intentional rather than surprising coincidences,” the complaint states.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and an order prohibiting the pollster from “publishing any further deceptive polls” and forcing them to disclose information they relied on in publishing the November poll. are.
The lawsuit was first reported by Fox News Digital.
“For too long, left-wing polling organizations have sought to influence election outcomes through manipulated polls that have unacceptable error rates and are not based on widely accepted polling methodology,” the complaint states. states.
“While Ms. Selzer was not the only poll worker involved in this corrupt practice, she had an enormous platform and following and therefore had a significant and influential opportunity to mislead voters.”
President Trump has increasingly escalated his legal battles with the media, including lawsuits against ABC, CBS, journalist Bob Woodward, and the Pulitzer Prize Board.
The president-elect threatened to sue over the Iowa poll during a Monday press conference when asked about ABC News’ recent $15 million settlement in a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump earlier this year. .
“In my opinion, this is fraud and election interference,” President Trump said of the Iowa poll.
The lawsuit names Selzer, his polling company, the Des Moines Register and the paper’s parent company, Gannett, as defendants.
Mr. Seltzer declined to comment.
“We are confident that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll will show Trump’s lead in Iowa by publishing the poll’s complete demographics, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, and technical description. Pollster Ann Selzer acknowledged that the results do not reflect the ultimate margin of victory for the president,” Gannett spokeswoman Lark Marie Anton said in a statement.
“We stand by our reporting on this matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit,” Anton added.
