President-elect Donald Trump announced Monday that he plans to sue the Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer over her survey finding Vice President Kamala Harris leading in Iowa ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
The Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll from Nov. 2, which had been conducted by Selzer’s company, found that Harris led Trump in Iowa 47% to 44%. Selzer said the vice president’s lead in the poll was likely due to her large support among young, college educated voters, along with older women.
Trump said during a Monday press conference that he has an “obligation” to sue Selzer and the newspaper after he won the state of Iowa by a staggering 14-point margin, 56% to 42.7%. The president-elect defeated Harris by winning all seven battleground states and by becoming the first Republican nominee to win the popular vote since the 2004 election.
“I’m doing this not because I want to, I’m doing this because I feel I have an obligation to. I’m gonna be bringing [a lawsuit] against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, who had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time, and just before the election said I was going to lose by 3 or 4 points,” Trump said. “It became the biggest story all over the world because I was gonna win Iowa by 20 points because the farmers love me and I love the farmers. And it was interesting the way she did it, [Selzer] brought it down two weeks before, said I was only gonna win by 4. That was a big story. But that was good because she brought it down from like 22 points to 4, or whatever the number was. Way up, an easy win. We never even thought to go there.”
After Trump’s election victory, Selzer wrote in a Nov. 7 op-ed for the Des Moines Register that she was set to review her “big miss” in the poll indicating a lead for Harris. The pollster said in her op-ed that Selzer & Company, where she serves as president, used the same method in the 2016 and 2020 polls which found the president-elect with a strong lead.
Critics reportedly accused her of having “manipulated” the data to show a false lead for the vice president, but Selzer indicated that the poll could have “energized” Republican voters to turn out in higher numbers to secure a victory for Trump, according to the op-ed.
“In response to a critique that I ‘manipulated’ the data, or had been paid (by some anonymous source, presumably on the Democratic side), or that I was exercising psyops or some sort of voter suppression: I told more than one news outlet that the findings from this last poll could actually energize and activate Republican voters who thought they would likely coast to victory. Maybe that’s what happened,” Selzer said.
ABC News and one of its prominent hosts, George Stephanopoulos, agreed Saturday to settle Trump’s defamation lawsuit by paying $15 million to the president-elect by Dec. 24 as a “charitable contribution.” The president-elect sued the network and Stephanopoulos after the host had falsely claimed that Trump had been found liable of rape in the civil case brought forth by former Elle Magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll during a March 10 segment on “This Week.”
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