'Election Interference': Trump Threatens To Sue Des Moines Register Over Poll
UPDATE:Dec. 17 ―President-elect Donald Trump on Monday evening officially filed a lawsuit against pollster J. Ann Selzer over a survey she conducted this fall showing Vice President Kamala Harris leading him by 3 percentage points in Iowa.
The lawsuit also names her polling company, the Des Moines Register newspaper and the outlet’s parent company, Gannett, as defendants.
PREVIOUSLY: President-elect Donald Trump said he’s planning a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register over its final election poll showing Trump running several points behind Vice President Kamala Harris in Iowa, a traditionally red state.
“In my opinion, it was fraud, and it was election interference,” Trump said during a press conference Monday afternoon at his Florida golf club after calling last month for an investigation into the matter.
The final Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll had Harris running 3 percentage points ahead of Trump just days before the election. Trump wound up winning the state by more than 13 points in November.
Trump wasn’t clear about whether he wants to sue just the newspaper or the veteran Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, whose firm, Selzer and Company, conducted the survey. Trump lauded Selzer on Monday for her accuracy in past elections; she had long been considered the “gold standard” pollster in the state that holds the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses.
“She’s got me right, always. She’s a very good pollster. She knows what she was doing,” Trump said.
Lark-Marie Anton, a spokesperson for the Register, told HuffPost: “We have acknowledged that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll did not reflect the ultimate margin of President Trump’s Election Day victory in Iowa by releasing the poll’s full demographics, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer. We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe a lawsuit would be without merit.”
Following Trump’s remarks, Selzer said she wouldn’t comment until she saw a legal document.
Selzer has defended the Nov. 2 poll, saying she was disturbed by the notion she intended to sway the election or that publishing the poll amounted to election interference. Selzer has announced her retirement since the poll’s release but said the change had been long planned.
“I am mystified about what the motivation anybody thinks I had and would act on in such a public poll. I don’t understand it. And the allegations I take very seriously. They’re saying that this was election interference, which is a crime. So, the idea that I intentionally set up to deliver this response, when I’ve never done that before — I’ve had plenty of opportunities to do it — it’s not my ethic,” Selzer said Friday on PBS’ “Iowa Press.”
In the same interview, Selzer didn’t let on why she believes her last poll got it so wrong. “If you’re hoping that I had landed on exactly why things went wrong, I have not,” she said.
The people who most often respond to polls tend to be older, own a landline phone, and are open to discussing their political views with a stranger. But pollsters have methods of weighting their data to reflect the overall makeup of the electorate, usually based on how segments of voters turned out in previous elections.
Trump on Monday also reiterated that he planned to sue CBS over claims “60 Minutes” doctored its pre-election interview with Harris, which Trump called a “giant fake news scam.”
An attorney for CBS has vehemently denied Trump’s assertion that the network sought to portray Harris in a positive light and suggested Trump might be liable for legal fees and counterclaims if he continues to pursue legal action.
CORRECTION: This article was updated to clarify the margin of Trump’s win in Iowa.
