WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is suing Ann Seltzer, her polling company The Des Moines Register and the newspaper’s parent company, Ganney, according to a copy of the document reviewed by NBC News Special, accusing them of defrauding consumers.
The lawsuit, filed Monday night in Polk County, Iowa, says it seeks “responsibility for blatant election interference” following a Nov. 2 poll that showed Kamala Harris leading in Iowa. Support rose by 3 percentage points.
Trump ultimately won the state by double digits, and his lawyers argued in the lawsuit that the disparity constituted a “fiction that interfered with the election.” The president-elect filed the claim under Iowa’s consumer fraud law, which prohibits deceptive advertising.
“I’m doing it because I feel like I have an obligation to do it. I’m going to go against the people of Iowa, their newspapers, there’s a very, very good pollster who always gets me right, and then right there Before the election, she said I was going to lose by 3 or 4 points,” Trump said Monday when discussing the lawsuit.
Selzer announced after the election that she would stop voting in political campaigns and turn to other causes.
A spokesman for the Des Moines Register said the newspaper stood by its reporting.
“We acknowledge that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll did not reflect President Trump’s ultimate margin of victory on Election Day in Iowa by releasing the poll’s full demographic data, crosstabs, Weighted and unweighted data and from pollster Ann Selzer,” said spokesperson Lack-Marie Anton. “We stand by our reporting on this matter and believe this lawsuit has no merit.
Seltzer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Media law experts doubt the lawsuit will have much success.
“The odds of winning here are slim to none, but winning in court is unlikely to be the real goal of this lawsuit,” said Clay Calvert, a media law expert and professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. “It’s to intimidate the press and reporters.” . Unfortunately, I suspect this lawsuit is just a harbinger of things to come.
The lawsuit states that “millions of Americans, including Plaintiffs, Iowa residents and Iowans, who contributed to the Trump Presidential campaign and its affiliated entities (the “Trump 2024 Campaign”) Fooled by the Doctored Harris Poll,” and the ‘Miss Poll’ wasn’t a stunning coincidence — it was intentional.”
It attacked Selzer’s reputation as a standard pollster, claiming polling errors that showed Harris leading in Iowa but never materialized were an attempt to sway the race. The lawsuit alleges that Selzer sought to influence political campaigns in favor of Democrats and that her massive platform provided “significant and impactful opportunities to deceive voters.”
The lawsuit is the latest front in Trump’s fight against what he considers biased media and analyst reporting.
Over the weekend, Trump received $15 million from ABC News in a defamation case, plus attorney fees, for a total of $1 million.
Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the UCLA School of Law, dismissed the lawsuit out of hand.
“I don’t expect this lawsuit to go anywhere,” he wrote on his blog.
This article originally appeared on NBCNews.com
