“I’m doing this not because I want to,” President-elect Donald Trump told reporters on Monday during his first news conference since the election. “I’m doing this because I feel I have an obligation.”
Trump was talking about suing news organizations and others who published stories he considers unfair. The president-elect was responding to a reporter’s question about his threat to launch a series of lawsuits over news stories.
“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,” Trump continued. “And then just before the election, she said I was going to lose by 3 or 4 points.”
According to Trump, the Iowa Poll published by the Des Moines Register on Nov. 2, three days before the election, which showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading him in Iowa “was fraud and it was election interference.”
At the end of his rambling, repetitive and unsupported claims about the Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer, whose company had conducted the Iowa Poll for the newspaper since 1997, earning a national reputation as one of the country’s best state-level political pollsters. Trump told the reporters gathered at Mar-a-Lago “we’ll be filing a major lawsuit against them today or tomorrow.”
On Monday night after the courts closed for the day, attorneys for Trump electronically filed that lawsuit. It accuses Selzer, her polling firm Selzer & Co., the Register and Gannett, the corporation that owns it, of violating the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act “through use of a leaked and manipulated Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll.”
The sole plaintiff listed is Donald J. Trump, “a resident of the State of Florida.” But according to the filing, Trump wasn’t the only one harmed.
“President Trump, together with all Iowa and American voters, is a consumer within the meaning of the statute,” the complaint states.
“Defendants furnished ‘merchandise’ to consumers within the broad meaning of the statute since they provided a service: physical newspapers, online newspapers, and other content that contained the [Nov. 2 Iowa] Poll.”
Trump is seeking unspecified monetary damages, and wants to have any amount a jury awards him tripled, under a provision of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act that allows a plaintiff to collect “three times the actual damages suffered” in cases where a defendant’s actions were “willful and wanton.”
What were the damages Trump suffered? The complaint doesn’t specify any. It does make a general claim that Trump needed “to expend extensive time and resources, including direct federal campaign expenditures, to mitigate and counteract the harms of the Defendants’ conduct.”
That claim is odd, since Trump didn’t change his campaign schedule to add a stop in Iowa after the poll was published. He also didn’t send his running mate JD Vance or any high-profile campaign surrogate to Iowa. There’s no evidence Trump increased his media spending in the state after the poll. The only obvious effect of the poll on Trump’s campaign is that it added another item to the list of grievances he repeated in his speeches and social media posts.
In addition to monetary damages, Trump is requesting “injunctive relief, including an order enjoining Defendants and their associates from publishing or releasing any further deceptive polls designed to influence the outcome of an election and requiring Defendants to disclose all data and information upon which they relied in creating, publishing, and releasing the [Nov. 2] Poll.”
The only obvious effect of the poll on Trump’s campaign is that it added another item to the list of grievances he repeated in his speeches and social media posts.
Trump began complaining about the Selzer poll almost as soon as it was published. The Register published the poll on the first Saturday night in November, and on Sunday morning Trump was denouncing it in his first rally of the day. He called the poll “fake” and “corrupt,” and said it was the work of “my enemies.”
“They can make those polls sing,” Trump said in his speech, claiming the Iowa Poll had been deliberately manipulated to make him look bad. “They can make them sing. They brag about it.”
Almost an hour later, Trump returned to the topic of the poll.
“I’m telling you, you can make those suckers sing,” he said. “You can do — you really do inflict damage, you know, when you do like this person from Iowa. Today, the election essentially is really — we’re talking turkey — comes out with a poll, different from every other poll. ‘Cause it wasn’t even in question, it’s really the opposite way, I’m way up … It’s called suppression. They suppress. And it actually should be illegal.”
Both Selzer and the Register have been clear that the poll was not manipulated, it was just wrong.
“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,” Lark-Marie Anton, a spokesperson for the Register, said in a statement after Trump filed his lawsuit on Monday. “We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit.”
Selzer has not issued a statement yet regarding the lawsuit. She has been clear that the poll was a failure, and that failure resulted from the methodology she uses. Her firm conducted a review of the poll, and the resulting 19-page report was published by the Register.
“I’ve read and listened to a lot of theories on the subject,” Selzer wrote at the beginning of the report. “To cut to the chase, I found nothing to illuminate the miss.”
“I totally respect Ann Selzer, but this is not a mystery,” Natalie Jackson, vice president of the public opinion research firm GQR, said in an X thread on Sunday.
Like other pollsters who have commented on the Nov. 2 Iowa Poll, Jackson attributed Selzer’s failure to her decision not to weight the survey sample based on the demographics of voters who turned out in recent elections. Selzer has never used the weighting other pollsters do in her work. Selzer’s approach “always worked best in populations that look like Iowa’s – older, whiter, etc. so it worked longer there than anywhere else,” Jackson wrote. But in the final polls of the 2024 election, Selzer “ran out of luck with response bias.”
It should come as no surprise that Donald Trump, who launched his career in national politics stoking racist conspiracy theories about President Obama’s birth certificate and who still routinely spreads conspiracy theories in his public statements (“They’re eating the dogs,” for example), isn’t interested in such a straightforward and obvious solution.
In his remarks on Monday, Trump called Selzer, whose name he never used, “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 and it became the biggest story all over the world, because I was going to win Iowa by 20 points. The farmers love me and I love the farmers. And it was interesting the way she did it.”
“She brought it down, two weeks before,” he continued. “She said I was only going to win by 4. And that was a big story. But that was good, because she brought down from like 22 points to 4. Or whatever the number was. Way up, way up. An easy win. Never even thought to go there. I respect them, I love them, they understand there’s no reason to go there.”
Trump was referring to the Iowa Poll published by the Register on Sept. 15, which showed his lead in the state had fallen from 18 percentage points in the previous poll to only 4. What Trump did mention was that between those two polls, the Democrat candidate had changed from Joe Biden — who always had polled badly in Selzer’s surveys — to Kamala Harris.
“She brought it from way up, walk away, which it was, and it turned out to be in the election, too, by the way,” Trump repeated. “A win by many, many points. And then she brought it down very smartly to 4 a couple of weeks before. And everyone said, ‘Wow, that’s amazing. He’s only up by 4 points.’ Then she brought it down to where I was down by 3 or 4, whatever number she used.”
According to Trump, “She knows what she was doing.”
The complaint filed by Trump’s attorneys makes the same argument, albeit using more formal language. But it still has a few Trumpian flourishes. For example, the filing refers to “Defendants and their fellow radicals,” complains about Selzer appearing on the MSNBC show of “left-wing extremist Rachel Maddow” and describes Trump as “the landslide winner of the 2024 Presidential Election.” (According to the most recent tabulations by the Associated Press, Trump received slightly less than 50 percent of the popular vote, and his margin of victory in the popular vote was the second-smallest since 1968.)
But that last point illustrates how unserious the lawsuit is. He did win the presidential election. He won Iowa, as he said, “by many, many points.” If he actually did anything in response to the poll during the three days between its publication and Election Day beyond ranting about it, it wasn’t obvious at the time and the complaint he filed contains no evidence of it. The complaint also contains no evidence that the Register or Selzer are dishonest or did anything beyond publishing a bad poll that has damaged both their reputations.
No one has ever sued over the results of a botched political poll like this before. But now pollsters and media organizations know Trump is willing to sue, regardless of the merits, over polls he dislikes.
Trump doesn’t have to worry about filing such an empty lawsuit in state court, because Iowa is one of only 16 states that doesn’t have an anti-SLAPP law. SLAPP is an acronym for “strategic lawsuits against public participation,” and the laws are meant to ensure that well-financed plaintiffs can’t use meritless lawsuits to try to silence opponents speaking out on matters of public concern. Even before Trump filed his lawsuit, this had recently been an issue in Iowa because Summit Carbon Solutions has been threatening to sue opponents of its proposed pipeline project over their public statements.
Trump has a decades-old history of filing lawsuits with little legal merit, some might say, and for reasons beyond what his filings actually state, including attempts to build political support to overturn the results of the 2020 election and try to avoid paying contractors the full amount he owes them. In this case, the lawsuit appears to be an opening salvo in his latest attempt to intimidate the media.
No one has ever sued over the results of a botched political poll like this before. But now pollsters and media organizations know Trump is willing to sue, regardless of the merits, over polls he dislikes. The potential time and expense involved defending against a Trump or Trump-inspired lawsuit may be factors considered before publishing polls that show he or his policies are unpopular.
“Our press is very corrupt,” Trump said at the Monday news conference. “Almost as corrupt as our elections.”
After he finished talking about his lawsuit in Des Moines, Trump mentioned some of his other ongoing lawsuits. He’s suing CBS (he doesn’t like how 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris), journalist Bob Woodward (he’s angry Woodward uses excerpts of his taped interviews with Trump in the audio version of his 2018 book, Fear: Trump in the White House) and he’s suing the Pulitzer Prize Board, demanding it rescind prizes awarded to the New York Times and the Washington Post for reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election (Trump claims that by honoring that reporting, the Pulitzer Board is, in effect, libeling him).
“I feel I have to do this,” Trump said about the lawsuits. “I shouldn’t really be the one to do it. It should have been the Justice Department, or somebody else.”
Given the Supreme Court’s July decision granting presidents almost blanket immunity for anything they order the Justice Department to do, and given that Trump’s choice for FBI Director is someone who has repeatedly talked about using the power of the federal government against the press, you might think the reporters at Mar-a-Lago would have follow-up questions about Trump’s assertion that the Justice Department should be involved in deciding which Pulitzer Prizes are legitimate, what TV interview edits are acceptable, whether Trump should get a cut of Bob Woodward’s book profits and if a bad Iowa Poll is “election interference.” You’d be wrong.
There were no follow-up questions. They moved on to other topics.
