Trump sues Des Moines Register newspaper, claiming ‘election interference’

US president-elect’s lawsuit comes days after reaching defamation settlement with ABC News.

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.

“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, cross-tabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer,” Anton said.

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.

Trump’s lawsuit comes just days after ABC News agreed to settle a defamation case he brought over anchor George Stephanopoulos’s inaccurate assertion that he had been found civilly liable for rape.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil liberties organisation, condemned the lawsuit as a “direct assault” on the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees the right to freedom of speech.

“If newspapers and polling firms are sued for ‘deceptive practices’ because they publish stories and poll results politicians don’t like, every media outlet’s First Amendment rights are threatened. Getting a poll wrong is not election interference or fraud,” the group said.

Trump, who is also suing CBS News over an interview with Harris that he claims was deceptively edited, faces steep legal hurdles to victory in his lawsuits due to the US’s speech protections, which rank among the strongest in the world.

Still, the suits could create difficulties for news organisations by exposing potentially embarrassing internal communications and subjecting journalists and executives to depositions.