President-elect Donald Trump is taking legal action against the Des Moines Register and its pollster, J. Ann Selzer, accusing them of “brazen election interference” and fraud.
On Monday morning, President-elect Donald Trump announced his intention to sue the Des Moines Register and its pollster, J. Ann Selzer, after Selzer’s manipulated final poll, published just days before the 2024 election, falsely claimed Kamala Harris was leading Trump in Iowa—a prediction proven wildly inaccurate when Trump secured a decisive 13-point victory in the state.
By late evening, Trump followed through, filing the lawsuit in Polk County, Iowa, under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act.
The lawsuit targets the Des Moines Register, Selzer & Company, and the newspaper’s corporate parent, Gannett, Fox News first reported.
Trump’s attorneys argue the poll was a deliberate and orchestrated attempt to deceive voters and sway the election in Harris’s favor.
“Contrary to reality and defying credulity, defendants’ Harris Poll was published three days before Election Day and purported to show Harris leading President Trump in Iowa by three points; President Trump ultimately won Iowa by over thirteen points,” the lawsuit states.
The suit highlights Selzer’s reputation as a so-called “gold standard” pollster—an image that the media has long used to lend credibility to her work. Yet, as Trump’s lawyers point out, Selzer’s track record is far from spotless.
“Selzer had prided herself on a mainstream reputation for accuracy despite several far less publicized egregious polling misses in favor of Democrats” and said she “would have the public believe it was merely a coincidence that one of the worst polling misses of her career came just days before the most consequential election in memory, was leaked and happened to go against the Republican candidate.”
“The Harris Poll was no ‘miss’ but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election,” the lawsuit states, adding that “defendants and their cohorts in the Democrat Party hoped that the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election.”
“Instead, the November 5 election was a monumental victory for President Trump in both the Electoral College and the Popular Vote, an overwhelming mandate for his America First principles, and the consignment of the radical socialist agenda to the dustbin of history.”
According to the lawsuit, the Democrat Party and its media allies were desperate for an artificial boost ahead of the 2024 election, given Kamala Harris’s undeniable weaknesses as a candidate.
Trump’s attorneys argue the poll was designed to suppress Republican turnout, increase Democrat enthusiasm, and force Trump’s campaign to waste resources defending Iowa—a state he ultimately won handily.
“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,” the lawsuit states. “As Selzer knows, this type of manipulation creates a narrative of inevitability for Democrat candidates, increases enthusiasm among Democrats, compels Republicans to divert campaign time and money to areas in which they are ahead, and deceives the public into believing that Democrat candidates are performing better than they really are.”
The lawsuit added, “Democrats need for fake polling was even more acute than usual in the 2024 Election, given Harris’s many fatal weaknesses as a candidate and lack of appeal to critical swaths of the traditional Democrat base.”
It can be recalled that following the embarrassing poll and recent gaffe, Ann Selzer announced her retirement.
In a column penned for the Des Moines Register, Selzer defended her career, touting her decades of work in polling and claiming an unblemished record—at least until her Iowa poll debacle.
She described polling as a “science of estimation” and acknowledged that “science has a way of periodically humbling the scientist.”
However, Selzer’s farewell read more like an excuse-laden retreat.
Trump wasted no time addressing Selzer’s record, taking to Truth Social to call for an investigation for possible “election fraud.”
Trump wrote:
“A totally Fake poll that caused great distrust and uncertainty at a very critical time. She knew exactly what she was doing.
Thank you to the GREAT PEOPLE OF IOWA for giving me such a record breaking vote, despite possible ELECTION FRAUD by Ann Selzer and the now discredited “newspaper” for which she works. An investigation is fully called for!”
