President-elect Donald Trump has made good on his promise to sue pollster J. Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register for their stupendously faulty polling that showed Kamala Harris with a three-point lead going into Election Day. While bad polling in and of itself isn’t illegal — it’s become a hallmark of American politics in recent election cycles — Trump maintains that Selzer and the Register intentionally fudged the numbers in order to swing the outcome of the election toward Harris.
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Here’s how RedState’s Bonchie reported the questionable results of the “gold standard” pollster just before Election Day:
To be frank, I don’t think Selzer’s final offering in Iowa is anywhere close to reality, and there’s empirical data to support that viewpoint. For example, the poll has Harris leading with seniors by 19 points. Trump won seniors there by nine points in 2020. The idea that Trump has lost 28 points among seniors in a relatively red state just doesn’t compute.
As Bonchie also noted, “Selzer had Trump up 14 points just a few months ago. Are we really to believe Iowa, a red state, has shifted 17 points toward the Democrat nominee? I mean, come on.” It turns out that Selzer should have stuck with her original numbers, as Trump went on to win Iowa by 13 points.
Selzer got it so spectacularly wrong that she retired mere weeks after the election, saying, “Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course. It’s ironic that it’s just the opposite.”
Related: After Getting Election Polling Spectacularly Wrong, Top-Rated Pollster Quits the Business
We Need to Talk About That Selzer Poll in Iowa That Has Democrats Predicting a Harris Landslide
If you’ll recall, Selzer and the Register came out with this astonishing poll just as Kamala Harris was tanking in most polling. What Selzer and the Register did was to provide a glimmer of hope to the left that if Harris was leading in Iowa, all of the other polling that showed her to be a loser of a candidate must have been wrong, too. This was going to be a landslide, and Kamala Harris would breeze into the White House.
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The Rachel Maddows and Jen Psakis of the world glommed onto this poll during the last weekend of the election, preaching to the leftist masses that they had the election in hand and all they needed to do was get out and vote. In the words of RedState’s own Sister Toldjah, “Cue the sad trombones.”
Team Trump sees something other than faulty polling at play in Iowa; they call the actions of Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register “brazen election interference” that was done “in favor of now-defeated former Democrat candidate Kamala Harris.”
Here are more details on the lawsuit:
The lawsuit was filed Monday night in Polk County, Iowa under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act and related provisions. It says it seeks “accountability for brazen election interference committed by” the Des Moines Register (DMR) and Selzer “in favor of now-defeated former Democrat candidate Kamala Harris through use of a leaked and manipulated Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll conducted by Selzer and S&C and published by DMR and Gannett in the Des Moines Register on Nov. 2, 2024.” The lawsuit is also against the parent company of the Des Moines Register, Gannett, which also owns other publications, including USA Today.
On the heels of his big win against ABC News, President-elect Trump said at a Monday press conference that he would continue to sue news outlets and social media influencers who lie about him. And he had a lot to say about Ann Selzer and her fantastical polling, including a very keen observation:
“In my opinion it was fraud and it was election interference. You know, she’s gotten me right always, she’s a very good pollster. She knew what she was doing.”
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“She knew what she was doing.” That’s the money quote right there because it speaks to Selzer’s motivation; with retirement on the horizon, did she possibly decide to take one for the team and issue a misleading poll in order to sway the election? It doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility, and that, indeed, sounds a lot like trying to sway the election.
It will be interesting to see how this lawsuit unfolds. It’s quite possible that ABC News settled with Trump in order to get out of having to provide discovery evidence; if so, what were they trying to hide? If Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register go a similar route, it will raise even more questions about the media and their attempts to influence the election.
