United States President-elect Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit accusing a newspaper and a polling firm of engaging in “brazen election interference” by publishing a pre-election survey that underestimated his popularity.
The lawsuit filed late on Monday accuses The Des Moines Register newspaper, its parent company Gannett and pollster Ann Selzer of intentionally downplaying Trump’s support in a poll that showed him trailing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
The November 2 poll, which showed Harris ahead by three percentage points in Iowa, generated widespread attention as Trump easily carried the midwestern state in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
Trump won Iowa in last month’s presidential election by more than 13 percentage points.
“Selzer’s polling ‘miss’ was not an astonishing coincidence – it was intentional,” the lawsuit filed in Iowa’s Polk County said. “As President Trump observed: ‘She knew exactly what she was doing.’”
The lawsuit, which bases its claims on alleged breaches of Iowa consumer fraud law, seeks triple the damages incurred as determined by a jury.
Lark-Marie Anton, a spokeswoman for The Des Moines Register, said the newspaper stood behind its reporting and viewed the lawsuit as without merit. Selzer did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but said in an interview with PBS last week that she was mystified why anyone would think she had designed the poll to generate a particular result.
Credit: aljazeera.com
