Donald Trump Sues Iowa Newspaper, Veteran Pollster Over ‘Deceptive’ Poll
HuffPost
The president-elect alleges the Nov. 2 poll that had Kamala Harris leading by 3 percentage points amounted to “brazen election interference.”
President-elect Donald Trump filed suit Monday night against the Des Moines Register newspaper and veteran Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer over a pre-election poll that showed Vice President Kamala Harris beating Trump in a state he easily carried just days later.
Trump is alleging the Nov. 2 poll that had Harris 3 percentage points ahead of him amounted to “brazen election interference” and contained “leaked” and “manipulated” data. Filed in Polk County, Iowa, under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, the lawsuit seeks an order preventing Selzer from releasing “any further deceptive polls” as well as unspecified damages.
Trump’s lawyers, in a filing first reported by Fox News Digital, accused the “defendants and their cohorts in the Democrat Party” of hoping “the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election.”
The president-elect had teased possible legal action against the newspaper and pollster during a press conference Monday, where he labeled the poll’s publication a “fraud” while also praising Selzer for her past accurate surveys.
Trump’s lawsuit names as defendants the Register; its parent company, Gannett, which owns USA Today; and Selzer and her polling firm, Selzer & Company. Selzer did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday, but the Register defended its decision to publish the outlier poll.