Donald Trump criticized the 2024 Des Moines Register poll.
Getty Images“Bombshell.” “Shocking.” “Very surprising.” Those were just some of the words used to describe an Iowa poll conducted toward the very end of the 2024 campaign by veteran pollster J. Ann Selzer that showed Harris carrying the state by three points. Donald Trump immediately pounced, calling the poll “fake.” A politician criticizing a poll he doesn’t like is nothing new, but Trump elevated his pique to a lawsuit filed against Selzer and the poll’s sponsor, the Des Moines Register and its parent company. In an amended brief, he was joined by two other Iowans, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and former state senator Bradley Zaun, who both believe the poll harmed them as well. On February 21, Selzer and her attorneys responded asking that the case be dismissed.
The late October Iowa Poll received outsized attention for several reasons. The country was in the final days of a hard fought presidential campaign where the candidates had been neck and neck in national polls for weeks. The poll dropped at a particularly critical time, 6 p.m. on November 2, just three days before the election. The striking new finding seemed to suggest significant momentum for Kamala Harris. In Trump’s petition’s words, the poll’s finding created “a false narrative of inevitability.”
The reputation of the Register’s Iowa Polls in recent presidential contests were a second factor. Trump won solid victories in the state in 2016 (9.5 points) and 2020 (8.2 points). Both margins were in line with the Des Moines Register polls’ results. Trump won the state by 13.2 points in 2024, yet Selzer’s final poll had Harris leading. The result was especially surprising because her September poll had shown Trump in the lead. Outliers happen.
A third factor was the pollster herself. Ann Selzer was one of the industry’s most respected pollsters and that gave her poll instant credibility with many. She had overseen the Des Moines Register polls for more than three decades and had a solid track record covering not only presidential contests, but many Senate and gubernatorial contests as well. As happens to any pollster who has been in the business a long time, there were some prominent contests where her results didn’t match election tallies.
Sparring with the media and holding grudges are features of Donald Trump’s combative personality. Like some other politicians, he is no fan of the polls except for those showing him doing well. Perhaps that is why he brought a lawsuit that appears, at least to this non-lawyer, unlikely to succeed. Trump filed the suit with his two coplaintiffs, using a consumer fraud statute to argue that the “fake” poll “deceived millions of Americans” and caused the plaintiffs harm by forcing them to divert resources to address it.
The highly respected nonpartisan organization the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is representing Selzer. In the brief, FIRE attorneys argued that the lawsuit fits “the very definition of a ‘SLAPP’ suit” — a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation meant to punish defendants through time and costs of litigation. FIRE argues that the First Amendment “bars the action.”
The Selzer legal team notes that the Supreme Court has said that simply labeling an action as fraudulent “is not sufficient for it to be fraudulent.” They charge that the suit is using claims of fraud to evade First Amendment protections. Trump claims that false news lies outside the First Amendment’s protection, but Selzer’s lawyers claim that “over 200 years of American free speech law and practice prove otherwise.”
The Selzer brief makes the obvious claim that “pollsters are not seers” and that results don’t always conform to final results. The lawyers note that every election has outlier polls. At the time Selzer released her poll, several poll watchers and their news organizations suggested hers could be one. An Emerson College poll taken around the same time had Trump comfortably ahead in Iowa.
I am a critic of the wall-to-wall coverage the media gives horserace polls during elections and then in presidential administrations. We are barely a month into the Trump presidency, and the pollsters and their media partners are still in campaign mode, having a field day charting whether Trump is winning or losing with the public. I don’t object to the polls themselves but the media’s insatiable consumption of transitory snapshots seems to me to be crowding out polls that could tell us a lot more about what makes our society tick.
It seems unlikely that Donald Trump will win this case. Selzer has retired as the paper’s pollster. Whatever the outcome, lawsuits like this one can tarnish the value that polling can provide.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article misstated that the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is representing the Des Moines Register. It is only representing Ann Selzer. The article has been corrected.
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