The president-elect is on the warpath. And he’s not taking any prisoners.
Now Trump announced a sweeping lawsuit that is taking down a massive Democrat organization.
President-elect Donald Trump announced Monday that he plans to sue the Des Moines Register and top pollster Ann Selzer over a pre-election survey that inaccurately showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading in Iowa ahead of the 2024 election.
The Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll, conducted by Selzer & Company on Nov. 2, claimed Harris led Trump 47% to 44%.
Selzer attributed Harris’s apparent lead to strong support among young, college-educated voters and older women.
Trump, who filed the lawsuit late Monday, made it clear during a press conference that he sees it as his duty to hold both Selzer and the newspaper accountable.
He pointed out his decisive 14-point victory in Iowa, where he beat Harris 56% to 42.7%, and reminded the press that his dominance extended nationally—winning all seven battleground states and becoming the first Republican since 2004 to win the popular vote.
“I’m doing this not because I want to, I’m doing this because I feel I have an obligation to,” Trump declared.
“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. 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.”
Trump accused Selzer and the Register of breaking Iowa’s consumer fraud laws by engaging in what he called “brazen election interference” and intentional deception, Fox News reported.
Following Trump’s overwhelming victory, Selzer penned a Nov. 7 op-ed for the Register in which she admitted to reassessing the “big miss” of her poll.
She defended her company’s methodology, noting it was the same system that accurately showed Trump leading in 2016 and 2020.
Critics, however, slammed Selzer for allegedly “manipulating” the data to falsely project a Harris lead.
Selzer pushed back on those accusations, suggesting her poll may have inadvertently energized Republican voters, driving them to the polls in larger numbers.
“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 explained in the op-ed.
Meanwhile, Trump’s legal victories continue to pile up. On Saturday, ABC News and anchor George Stephanopoulos agreed to settle Trump’s defamation lawsuit by paying $15 million to the president-elect as a “charitable contribution” by Dec. 24.
Trump sued after Stephanopoulos falsely claimed in a March 10 segment of This Week that Trump had been found liable for r*pe in the civil case brought by former Elle Magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll.
Stay tuned to The Federalist Wire.
