President-Elect Donald J. Trump. BBC/Getty.
Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register over a wildly inaccurate 2024 poll. BBC. Trump accused the pollster, J. Ann Selzer of "blatant election interference" for the poll that showed Kamala Harris with a 3 to 4 point lead in Iowa. All other polling Iowa showed Trump in a comfortable lead and he went on to carry the state by 13 points. Trump accused Selzer of intentionally skewing the poll results to damage his campaign and help prop up a faltering Harris campaign. Trump has been litigious lately, winning a settlement against ABC News, which falsely accused him of being found guilty of rape.
My Comment:
I am not sure, but this seems like a fairly unprecedented development. As far as I know, nobody has sued for an outlier poll before. But this was hardly just any poll. It caused an absolute firestorm when it was released and it did indeed give some lifeblood to the Harris campaign.
The question is if it was just a genuine mistake by the pollster, J. Ann Selzer, or if she did this with malice. There is an argument to be made for both, and I am sure both sides will be heard in court assuming the case isn't settled.
Polling is a tricky business after all, they have very consistently had trouble polling for Trump supporters and that was just as true in 2024. It's very possible that Selzer just screwed up and was polling the absolute worst demographics for the election in Iowa. From what I have heard she did try to focus on college towns which could obviously skew the results. That alone could have been enough to get these crazy results.
But it's also very possible that this was a push poll, done on purpose to try and help the Harris campaign. Supposedly the poll results were forwarded to some Democrats before the poll was released, which at least gives the appearance of corruption.
What makes me think it was the 2nd option was that Selzer had a good reputation as a pollster until 2024. Indeed, her earlier polls in the cycle were a lot more accurate. And she had to know what the implications would be if she focused on the college towns instead of the more traditional rural areas of the state. And she also had to know the trends with the rest of the polling industry and the internal polls of both the Democrats and Republicans that showed Trump ahead in Iowa. In short, she's too good at her job to be this incompetent.
Will Trump win his lawsuit? It's possible. The Des Moines Register might just want this to go away and they could settle like ABC News did. If Trump's claims are found to be true, which I think they will be, they probably stand to lose a lot more than they would if they just settled. And I think Trump is at least likely to win the court case as he would in a defamation claim against ABC News.
Of course the real effect will be that folks will be scared to try and do this again. Folks in the polling industry now know that if a poll is farcical then they risk a lawsuit over it. This should help against this kind of thing happening again.
And to be clear, this did have an effect in the 2024 race. The Harris camp and the Democrats were in desperation territory before this poll came out. They were afraid that folks would just stay home and not even vote because there was no point. So this poll came out and gave them some kind of hope right when things were at their lowest and gave them a shot in the arm. It ended up not mattering, Harris lost in a landslide, but if this was a closer race like 2020 was then it could have turned the course of the election. I do think that if this was a case of a pollster lying than there absolutely should be a punishment for it. Our elections do depend on accurate polling to a degree and if this was a case of the pollster going above and beyond to try and swing the race than they should absolutely be punished for it.
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