President Donald Trump has sued famous pollster J. Ann Selzer, her firm Selzer & Company, The Des Moines Register, and its parent company Gannett for violating Iowa’s consumer fraud laws after it published arguably fake data two days before the 2024 general election. Trump is alleging it wasn’t an unintentional mistake that led to the warped results being broadcast to the key election state of Iowa.
Selzer, using unknown methods to support her claim, predicted that Kamala Harris had the lead in Iowa. Trump says that pushing that narrative, Selzer was trying to help Democrats win the state.
The poll, released Nov. 2, said Harris was winning by 3 points — 47% to Trump’s 44%.
In fact, Trump won Iowa by nearly a landslide of 56%, a full 14 point difference. There is, at least, an appearance that both the newspaper and its pollster were colluding.
“In my opinion, it was fraud, and it was election interference,” Trump said.
“The [Kamala] Harris Poll was no ‘miss’ but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election,” the court filing says. Read it at this link.
After her disastrous embarrassment in Iowa, Selzer said she will no longer do election polling, but will move on to “other opportunities.”
Nearly all election polls overstate the strength of liberal/progressive candidates and only a handful of pollsters are considered nonpartisan. Reliable pollsters are hard to come by; in Alaska, Dittman Research is considered the most credible. On the national level, Rasmussen Reports, which is conservative, has an acknowledged built-in bias but ends up with fairly credible results.
Earlier this month, Trump agreed to a settlement with ABC News after anchor George Stephanopoulos said on television that Trump had been found guilty of rape. He was not found guilty of rape, but of defamation and sexual abuse of his accuser. ABC has agreed to pay Trump $15 million, earmarked for his presidential library.
Will Trump now go after all the columnists and social influencers who called him a Nazi or fascist during the campaign? If so, he’ll have many Democrats and socialists to litigate against.
At one time in America, falsely calling someone a Nazi was de facto libel or slander, but the phrase is being tossed around liberally these days by many liberals and social media account-holders.
Here are a few examples of news organizations that used the terms Trump, Hitler, Nazi, and fascist in headlines and made the implication that Trump fit the description. These organizations may be able to away with it because of how they carefully couched their terms:
How Trump’s rhetoric compares to historic fascist language – PBS
What Does It Mean That Donald Trump Is a Fascist? – New Yorker
Harris says Trump ‘is a fascist’ – AP
DNC projects message tying Trump to Hitler – NBC
Donald Trump’s history with Adolf Hitler and his Nazi writings – ABC
Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini – The Atlantic
FiveThirtyEight, a polling news reporting company owned by ABC, wrote that the Trump lawsuit is disturbing.
“This would obviously be a baseless lawsuit, but just saying this has a chilling effect, and most pollsters don’t have the financial resources for a legal battle,” wrote Nathaniel Rakich, senior editor at FiveThirtyEight, on X/Twitter.
