An egregiously wrong Des Moines Register poll by formerly well-respected pollster J. Ann Selzer published three days before the presidential election has catalyzed President-elect Donald Trump to say enough is enough — and sue them.
On November 2, the Register published Selzer’s poll, which came as a shock, as it showed Vice-President Kamala Harris with a three-point lead over Trump in a state Trump wound up winning by over 13 points. Within days after the election, Selzer abruptly retired.
There were suspicions about the apparent leaking of the poll prior to its release. “Roughly 45 minutes prior to the poll’s public release, a stray tweet predicted the poll’s findings,” Semafor reported. “Its author said that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, a Duke University alumnus, had mentioned the not-yet-released poll during a Duke Democrats meeting that day.”
Selzer is about to drop Kamala +3
Source: Major campaign surrogate
Not joking. Mark my words.— Ryan
(@IllinoisLib) November 2, 2024
our goat makes sure we eat
pic.twitter.com/uBH16bLlbq
— Socialists For Pritzker (@PritzkerForPrez) November 3, 2024
The lawsuit, filed Monday night and also naming Gannett, the Register’s parent company, states 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,” Fox News reported.
The lawsuit also states, “Contrary to reality and defying credulity, defendants’ Harris Poll was published three days before Election Day and purported to show Harris leading President Trump in Iowa by three points; President Trump ultimately won Iowa by over thirteen points.” It continues that the three-point Harris lead in “deep-red Iowa was not reality, it was election-interfering fiction.”
Selzer had “prided herself on a mainstream reputation for accuracy despite several far less publicized egregious polling misses in favor of Democrats,” the lawsuit continued, and that Selzer “would have the public believe it was merely a coincidence that one of the worst polling misses of her career came just days before the most consequential election in memory, was leaked and happened to go against the Republican candidate.”
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More from the lawsuit:
The Harris Poll was no ‘miss’ but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election … defendants and their cohorts in the Democrat Party hoped that the Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election. … Instead, the November 5 election was a monumental victory for President Trump in both the Electoral College and the Popular Vote, an overwhelming mandate for his America First principles, and the consignment of the radical socialist agenda to the dustbin of history.
“Left-wing pollsters have attempted to influence electoral outcomes through manipulated polls that have unacceptable error rates and are not grounded in widely accepted polling methodologies,” the lawsuit contends. “While Selzer is not the only pollster to engage in this corrupt practice, she had a huge platform and following and, thus, a significant and impactful opportunity to deceive voters. As Selzer knows, this type of manipulation creates a narrative of inevitability for Democrat candidates, increases enthusiasm among Democrats, compels Republicans to divert campaign time and money to areas in which they are ahead, and deceives the public into believing that Democrat candidates are performing better than they really are.”
Trump’s attorneys stated that voters were “badly deceived and misled as to the actual position of the respective candidates in the Iowa Presidential race. … Moreover, President Trump, the Trump 2024 Campaign, and other Republicans were forced to divert enormous campaign and financial resources to Iowa based on the deceptive Harris Poll.”
