President-elect Donald Trump has made good on his threat to sue the Des Moines Register over a poll that showed him trailing Kamala Harris.
In a complaint filed Monday night in Iowa, Trump accused pollster Ann Selzer of deliberately releasing a fake poll for the purpose of manufacturing support for Harris. The Selzer poll showed Harris leading Trump in Iowa by three points. Three days later, Trump won the state by 13 points.
“Pollsters such as Selzer… and news organizations such as DMR and Gannett, are responsible for accurately representing the truth of events, not distorting polls to try and falsely make their preferred candidate appear to be in the lead,” the lawsuit states. “Due to Defendants’ actions, the public could not discern who was truly leading in the Iowa Presidential race and, as a result, were, or could have been, badly deceived into thinking that Harris was leading the race.”
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In response, Des Moines Register spokeswoman Lark-Marie Anton said the suit is “without merit.”
“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,” Anton said. “We stand by our reporting on the matter and will vigorously defend our First Amendment rights.”
During a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, Trump said he would file a “major lawsuit” against the newspaper.
“In my opinion it was fraud and it was election interference,” he said. “She’s a very good pollster. She knows what she was doing.”
Selzer retired from election polling last month, and has said she is at a loss to explain the 16-point miss.
Trump sued the Des Moines Register under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, which protects consumers from deceptive business practices.
Trump’s lawyer, Edward Andrew Paltzik, also sued CBS in October over a “60 Minutes” interview with Harris, which Trump alleged was deceptively edited. That suit similarly alleged a violation of the Texas consumer fraud statute.
Paltzik alleges in the new lawsuit that Trump and other consumers were “badly deceived and misled as to the actual position of the respective candidates in the Iowa Presidential race.” As a result, he alleges that Trump and his campaign “were forced to divert enormous campaign and financial resources to Iowa.”
CBS is seeking to throw out the “60 Minutes” case on the grounds that the Texas consumer fraud statute does not apply to editorial decisions protected by the First Amendment. CBS’s lawyers argued that courts across the country recognize a “critical distinction between, on the one hand, commercial speech subject to regulatory regimes like the [Texas law], and, on the other hand, political or editorial speech.”
Trump is also suing Bob Woodward for publishing audio recordings of his interviews with Trump for the book “Rage.” Among other things, that suit claims a violation of Florida’s deceptive trade practices law, which Woodward’s lawyers argue does not apply to expressive speech.
Trump scored a significant win in his legal war against the media on Saturday, when ABC News agreed to contribute $15 million to his presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit. In that case, George Stephanopoulos stated on air that Trump had been found liable for rape, though the jury’s verdict held him liable only for “sexual abuse.”