President-elect Donald Trump announced on Monday his plans to sue the Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer over a pre-election survey that showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading in Iowa ahead of the election.
The controversial Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll, conducted by Selzer’s firm and published on November 2, reported Harris with a narrow 47% to 44% lead over Trump in Iowa.
Selzer attributed Harris’s advantage to strong support from young, college-educated voters and older women. However, Trump ultimately carried Iowa by a decisive 14-point margin, securing 56% of the vote to Harris’s 42.7%.
During a Monday press conference, Trump announced his intention to pursue legal action against Selzer and the newspaper, claiming the poll inaccurately reflected his position in the state.
“I’m not doing this because I want to. I’m doing this because I feel I have an obligation,” Trump said. He argued that the poll undermined confidence in his campaign, despite his eventual resounding victory in Iowa and across all seven battleground states. Trump also became the first Republican presidential candidate since 2004 to win the national popular vote.
Trump accused Selzer of manipulating data to show Harris in the lead. “Just before the election, they said I was going to lose Iowa by 3 or 4 points,” Trump said. “It became the biggest story all over the world. But I ended up winning by a landslide because the farmers love me, and I love the farmers.”
In a November 7 op-ed published in the Des Moines Register, Ann Selzer addressed the inaccuracies in her poll while defending her methodology. She explained that the survey followed the same approach that had correctly predicted Trump’s wins in Iowa in both 2016 and 2020. Selzer also suggested that the poll’s findings might have unintentionally spurred higher Republican voter turnout.
“In response to critiques that I ‘manipulated’ the data or acted as part of some Democratic conspiracy, I noted that the findings could have energized Republican voters who might have otherwise become complacent. Maybe that’s what happened,” Selzer wrote.
In a separate legal case, ABC News and host George Stephanopoulos recently settled a defamation lawsuit with Donald Trump. As part of the settlement, the network agreed to make a $15 million charitable contribution on Trump’s behalf by December 24.
The lawsuit arose from a March 10 segment on This Week, during which Stephanopoulos inaccurately stated that Trump had been found liable for rape in a civil case involving E. Jean Carroll.
