A lawsuit over a Des Moines Register poll that showed Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump in Iowa during the final days of the 2024 campaign has been moved to federal court.
The lawsuit, one of two related to the poll, is a potential class-action case filed by the Center for American Rights on behalf of one West Des Moines man, Dennis Donnelly, against the Register, pollster J. Ann Selzer, and the newspaper’s parent company, Gannett Co. It seeks actual damages totaling $2,799,600 — the alleged cost of an annual subscription for each of the Register’s 40,000 subscribers — plus punitive damages and attorneys’ fees.
Because the lawsuit involves litigants headquartered in different states, and the total damages could exceed $5 million, the Register’s parent company, Gannett Co., sought removal of the case from state court to U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa.
The lawsuit takes issue with a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll that Selzer conducted for the Register in the final days of the 2024 presidential campaign. The poll, published the Sunday before the election, showed Harris leading Trump among likely Iowa voters 47 percent to 44 percent. Trump went on to win Iowa with 56 percent of the vote to Harris’ 43 percent.
The lawsuit alleges “a miss by 16 points is not an innocent error — it is either intentional fraud or reckless disregard for accuracy. Either way it is actionable.” It is based on the Center for American Rights’ claim that Donnelly, a Register subscriber, “was intensely frustrated by the inaccurate poll,” which was published on the Sunday before the election. It alleges Donnelly “felt like the Register was disserving him and other readers when it ran, and when its results were compared to the final outcome.”
The lawsuit seeks damages for alleged consumer fraud, professional malpractice and interference with the right to vote. The latter claim is based on the argument that “it looks like the Iowa Poll did, in fact, increase Iowa public opinion favoring Harris to win the state.”
The defendants in the case have denied any wrongdoing and the lawsuit has yet to win class-action status.
Donnelly’s lawsuit parallels one filed by Trump
A separate lawsuit against the Register and Selzer over the same poll results was filed late last year on behalf of Trump, U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, and former state senator Brad Zaun in Polk County District Court. Like the lawsuit filed on behalf of Donnelly, Trump’s lawsuit has since been moved to federal court.
In that lawsuit, Trump and his co-plaintiffs claim the poll results in their races were intentionally skewed and that in the presidential race “Selzer was trying to generate fake enthusiasm and momentum for Harris.”
The defendants are seeking dismissal of the lawsuit, arguing the laws they are accused of violating are designed to regulate commercial businesses, not to constrain news reporting, and that polling results “do not qualify as falsified facts” merely because they don’t align with an election’s outcome.
“In our constitutional system, a claim for ‘fraudulent news’ does not exist. Full stop,” attorneys for the newspaper argue. “The remedy for disagreement with political speech one does not like is counter-speech — not court-enforced damages under the guise of commercial regulations.”
In that same case, the Center for American Rights recently asked permission to file a brief of its own in the matter, arguing that its lawsuit on behalf of Donnelly was based on largely the same issues and that the center hopes to challenge “the use and abuse of powerful and entrenched media institutions to distort our national debate.”
U.S. Magistrate Judge William P. Kelly ruled against the center two weeks ago, finding that while the center clearly had an interest in Trump’s lawsuit, the “core arguments” the center would make have already been made by the president and his fellow plaintiffs in the case.
Clark Kauffman is deputy editor of Iowa Capital Dispatch, where this story first appeared.
