Trump Sues Pollster J. Ann Selzer And Des Moines Register Over Pre-Election Poll Showing Him Behind, Identifies Inaccurate Survey As Form Of Consumer Fraud Iowans Suffered By Reading
DES MOINES, Iowa. President-elect Donald J. Trump filed suit Monday against pollster J. Ann Selzer, the Des Moines Register, and parent company Gannett in Polk County District Court, alleging that a November poll showing Vice President Kamala Harris leading him by three points in Iowa amounted to "brazen election interference" actionable under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, a statute legal historians noted was originally written to protect Iowans from misleading commercial advertisements for products such as hair restoration tonics and aluminum siding.
The complaint, filed roughly six weeks before Mr. Trump's inauguration and roughly six weeks after he carried Iowa by approximately 13 percentage points, requests damages, attorneys' fees, and a public retraction of a poll that had, the suit acknowledged, no apparent effect on the outcome of an election Mr. Trump won. Selzer, regarded across four decades as among the most accurate state pollsters in American politics, announced within days of the suit's filing that she was retiring from electoral polling, an outcome the president-elect's team described as not formally part of the relief sought.
"This was a fake poll done by a fake pollster," the president-elect said in a statement that did not identify any specific methodological defect. "It's election interference, and it's brazen, and we're going to fight it very harshly." An attorney for Mr. Trump explained the underlying legal theory at a subsequent press conference, namely that Iowa consumers had purchased the Sunday Des Moines Register under the false impression that the printed poll numbers would prove correct, satisfying, the attorney argued, the consumer-protection statute's prohibition on deceptive commercial conduct in the marketing of goods.
Constitutional scholars contacted for comment expressed mild surprise at the theory, noting that publishing pre-election polls, including ones the subject of the polls happens to dislike, has not historically been actionable under American law, and that treating a newspaper survey as fraud against its own readers would constitute a novel theory likely to depress future state polling. The president-elect's legal team identified that response as the kind of thinking that had permitted unfavorable polls to be published in the first place.
The Selzer suit joins a series of recent Trump filings against media organizations, including pending matters against CBS over "60 Minutes" edits and against the Pulitzer Prize Board over its decision not to revoke the 2018 prize awarded to Times and Post reporters for Russia coverage. ABC News had two days earlier agreed to pay $15 million to settle a separate defamation matter Mr. Trump had brought, an outcome a person familiar with the president-elect's media strategy, speaking on condition of anonymity, described as evidence of a workable "deterrence framework," under which the cost of publishing journalism Mr. Trump dislikes would, going forward, be set incrementally higher than the cost of publishing none at all.
At press time, every Iowa pollster surveyed by the Des Moines Register about whether they intended to continue polling Iowa elections had declined to respond.