Donald Trump, the new president, is suing the Des Moines Register newspaper, its parent business, and its former pollster for “brazen election interference” because of a poll that came out just a few days before the 2024 election.
A poll taken on November 2 showed that Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, would win Iowa, which is mostly Republican.
Trump sued right after winning a defamation suit against ABC News in which a reporter lied and said Trump was found guilty of rape last year when he was actually found guilty of sexual abuse. The case was settled for $15 million (£12 million).
Trump has been rude to the American press since his first bid for president, and this is likely to continue into his second term.
Today, at a news conference, he said that he was going to sue the Iowa paper. He also called the press “corrupt.” It was filed in Polk County, Iowa, later that same morning.
He calls the well-known pollster J. Ann Selzer guilty of “brazen election interference” in it.
Based on her study, the president-elect was thought to lose Iowa by three to four points. Many experts didn’t understand why she said Trump would lose a state he had won by more than eight points in 2020, even though other Iowa polls showed a different result.
A little over a week later, Trump won Iowa by 13 points in the election.
“In my opinion, it was fraud and election interference,” Trump told the press on Monday.
Adding, “I feel I have to do this,” “It costs a lot of money to do it but we have to straighten out the press.”
The lawsuit says that Ms. Selzer changed the poll data on purpose to help Harris win.
“The Harris poll was no ‘miss’ but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 presidential election,” the suit says.
It also says that “left-wing pollsters” generally change the results of their polls and don’t follow “widely accepted polling methodologies.” But the filing doesn’t name any other surveys or go into more detail about those claims.
Ms. Selzer quit her job soon after the election, which she said had nothing to do with the vote.
Trump wants the court to give him money damages and pay his lawyers’ fees. He also wants the news source to “disclose all information upon which they relied” for the poll.
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Lark-Marie Anton, a spokeswoman for the Des Moines Register, said that the paper had already released “the poll’s full demographics, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer.” The paper also said that it had admitted that the poll “did not reflect the ultimate margin of President Trump’s Election Day victory in Iowa.”
She told CBS News, which is a partner of BBC, “We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe a lawsuit would be for no reason.”
A post on X said that litigation from the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Seth Stern would make it so that “journalists can’t help but look over their shoulders knowing the incoming administration is on the lookout for any pretext or excuse to come after them.”
Trump has fought CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times in the past. In the last few days of his 2024 campaign, he also sued CBS over how it had changed an interview with Harris. The network is now trying to get the lawsuit thrown out.
ABC News decided to give $15 million to a “presidential foundation and museum” that Trump is planning to set up for his life after the presidency, which is why the Des Moines Register sued.
It was not true that Trump had been found “liable for rape” by George Stephanopoulos in an interview earlier this year.
In fact, a civil case from last year found that Trump was responsible for “sexual abuse” of writer E. Jean Carroll, which has a special meaning in New York law.
ABC also wrote in an editor’s note that they “regret” Stephanopoulos’s comments and agreed to pay $1 million for Trump’s legal bills.
