Decrying First Amendment Threat, FIRE Will Defend Pollster Whom Trump Sued for ‘Consumer Fraud’
After Donald Trump sued pollster J. Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register under Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act last month, Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), called the president-elect’s claims “absurd” and “a direct assault on the First Amendment.” Acting on that assessment, FIRE this week announced that it will represent Selzer as she fights Trump’s allegation that she defrauded consumers by conducting a preelection poll that erroneously gave Democratic nominee Kamala Harris a narrow lead in Iowa.
Trump’s lawsuit, which was originally filed in the Iowa District Court for Polk County but has been transferred to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, “violates long-standing constitutional principles” and is “entirely meritless under the Iowa law,” FIRE says. The organization describes the case as “the very definition” of a “strategic lawsuit against public participation” (SLAPP). Such lawsuits, it explains, “are filed purely for the purpose of imposing punishing litigation costs on perceived opponents, not because they have any merit or stand any chance of success.” FIRE says the case also exemplifies “a worrying trend of activists and officials using consumer fraud lawsuits to target political speech they don’t like.”
Selzer conducted a presidential poll for the Register that indicated Harris had a small lead over Trump in Iowa. According to that poll, which was released on the Saturday before the election, 47 percent of Iowa voters favored Harris, compared to 44 percent for Trump. Those results proved to be off by more than a little: Trump won Iowa by a 13-point margin.
“Selzer’s Iowa polls have long enjoyed ‘gold standard’ status, accurately predicting Donald Trump’s victories in Iowa in 2016 and 2020,” FIRE says. “But despite using the same methodology as her previous polls, Selzer’s final 2024 poll, commissioned by the Register, was this cycle’s outlier, predicting a narrow Harris victory.”
Selzer “owned up to the margin between her poll and the eventual outcome of Trump comfortably winning Iowa,” FIRE adds. “She acknowledged the ‘biggest miss of my career’ and did what good pollsters do: She explained her methodology and publicly shared the poll’s crosstabs (results reported out by demographic and attitudinal subgroups), its questionnaire (with demographic information and weighted and unweighted responses), and her theories on the results, inviting others to offer theirs in turn.”
Selzer’s admission of error was not good enough for Trump. His lawsuit argues that publication of the poll’s surprising results, which generated wide news coverage, amounted to “brazen election interference” that violated Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act.
Trump’s use of that sta
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