President-elect Donald Trump filed a lawsuit late Monday against the Des Moines Register newspaper and its highly respected former pollster, adding to his ongoing legal attacks against news media companies.
The suit -- which names the newspaper's parent company, Gannett; its former pollster J. Ann Selzer; and her polling firm -- centers on a Selzer poll released three days before the presidential election that showed Trump trailing Vice President Kamala Harris.
The poll, released by what has been considered one of the nation's most respected polling firms, caused a national stir and buoyed some Democrats' hopes, as it showed Harris leading Trump in the red state by 3 percentage points and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. Trump ended up winning Iowa by about 13 points.
Trump's attorneys filed the suit in Polk County, where Des Moines is located, just days after ABC News settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump, agreeing to pay $15 million.
The new complaint, however, does not hinge on a defamation claim -- public figures have to cross a high legal threshold to prove that they've been libeled -- but rather a perceived violation of consumer protection law. It's a legal strategy that Trump is also using in a separate lawsuit against CBS News.
Trump's new lawsuit claims that Selzer's poll amounted to "election interference," arguing that the newspaper and pollster "hoped that the ... (poll) would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris" in the last week of the campaign. This, the suit says, is a violation of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act.
"For too long, left-wing pollsters have attempted to influence electoral outcomes through manipulated polls that have unacceptable error rates and are not grounded in widely accepted polling methodologies," the complaint reads. "While Selzer is not the only pollster to engage in this corrupt practice, she had a huge platform and following and, thus, a significant and impactful opportunity to deceive voters."
Selzer said Tuesday morning that she had not seen the lawsuit and had no comment.
Lark-Marie Antón, a Gannett spokeswoman, said in a statement that although the poll's findings differed from the election results, the newspaper stands by its reporting.
"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," Antón said in a statement. "We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe a lawsuit would be without merit."
THE INDUSTRY WATCHES
Selzer is highly regarded in the political polling world. Her polling has been among the most accurate over time; a FiveThirtyEight analysis of historical polling data ranked it as 2.8 out of 3 stars. So her early-November poll sent shock waves across the political class, who debated whether her findings portended an unaccounted-for Harris advantage.
She announced after the election that she would be stepping away from election polling, and has written that she analyzed the poll findings after the election and found nothing in the data to "illuminate the miss."
The nonpartisan American Association for Public Opinion Research said it would watch the lawsuit closely, calling public opinion research "an essential component of democratic processes and First Amendment Rights."
"Election polls aim to provide insights into public thinking and potential behavior, not definitive election forecasts," the group said in a statement. "Differences between polling results and election outcomes can and often do occur for reasons unrelated to misconduct or fraud."
A spokesman for Trump's transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But Trump previewed his Iowa lawsuit during a Monday news conference at his Florida home, even as he referred to Selzer in positive terms.
"I'm doing this not because I want to. I'm doing this because I feel I have an obligation to," Trump told reporters. He ran down a list of legal actions he has taken against media entities, including a pending libel lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize board over a statement the board made when it reaffirmed its decision to award prizes to the New York Times and The Washington Post in 2018 for coverage of Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.
"I shouldn't really be the one to do it. It should have been the Justice Department or somebody else, but I have to do it," Trump said, adding, "Our press is very corrupt."
HARD LEGAL FIGHT PREDICTED
Free speech advocates denounced the lawsuit. Robert Corn-Revere, the chief counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, called it "absurd" and "a direct assault on the First Amendment."
"Newspapers and polling firms are not engaged in 'deceptive practices' just because they publish stories and poll results President-elect Donald Trump doesn't like," Corn-Revere said in a statement. "Getting a poll wrong is not election interference or fraud."
And legal experts doubted that Trump would prevail in court.
"You would have to prove that a false statement was made and that the statement was made with people intending to rely on it," said Rick Hasen, a professor of law at UCLA. "If someone is accurately reporting the results of a poll, that wouldn't be a false statement. The poll might have errors in it, but that wouldn't be a false statement."
He added that the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act protects consumers from being misled in relation to the sale of merchandise and that the Trump complaint does "somersaults" to try to fit this conduct under the statute.
Seth Stern, director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said Trump and his political allies have used consumer protection laws as a workaround when defamation lawsuits aren't as feasible. Public figures claiming defamation have to prove that defendants knowingly made false statements or acted recklessly in making them.
But even if such a legal strategy fails, Stern said, lawsuits can create a chilling effect because of the money and time media companies and journalists must spend fighting them.
"It creates an environment where journalists can't help but look over their shoulders knowing the incoming administration is on the lookout for any pretext or excuse to come after them," he said. This is especially troubling, Stern added, as the media companies are facing difficult economic headwinds that may be leaving them more cautious about incurring legal fees.
'ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE'
Trump has long derided the news media, calling reporters the "enemy of the people" since his first successful run for president, and he has pursued legal action against reporters and companies. Last month, his campaign filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against The Post, claiming that the newspaper company made illegal in-kind contributions to Harris' campaign. That complaint refers to a story in Semafor that reported, without citing a source, that The Post purchased advertising to amplify stories critical of Trump. A Post spokesperson at the time dismissed the accusations as "without merit."
Trump also sued CBS News in October over a "60 Minutes" interview with Harris, saying its edit of the sit-down amounted to election interference.
His recently settled suit against ABC News stemmed from a televised interview in which anchor George Stephanopoulos said Trump was found "liable for rape" when a jury had found him liable for sexual abuse in the case of E. Jean Carroll, who said Trump raped her in a department store in the mid-1990s. In 2023, the jury awarded Carroll $5 million for battery and defamation. Early this year, Carroll was awarded an additional $83.3 million in damages for defamatory statements Trump made that disparaged her and denied her rape accusations.
While legal observers were split over the merit of Trump's defamation lawsuit against ABC News, the settlement raised concerns that he might feel more emboldened to legally go after media outlets for coverage he dislikes.
"It's not at all clear to me who would have won (the ABC News defamation) case had it gone to trial, but it was not a frivolous claim," Hasen said. "It was a claim that was within the realm of reality, whereas this Des Moines Register case does not seem (to be)."