The surveys of J. Ann Selzer once carried the hopes and fears of the men and women who sought to lead the nation, recording with uncanny accuracy the views of Iowa voters who exercised outsize influence in the choosing of American presidents.
Now just weeks into her retirement, Ms. Selzer represents something unexpected: fears for how retribution could shape a second Trump term.
Rather than for her successes, Ms. Selzer, the longtime director of a survey known simply as the Iowa Poll, is being pilloried for one last, spectacular miss — findings released on Nov. 2 that showed Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of Donald J. Trump in deep-red Iowa in the 2024 presidential election, raising the specter of an avalanche of unanticipated support from America’s women.
That poll is the subject of a lawsuit filed in Polk County, Iowa, this week by Mr. Trump’s lawyers against Ms. Selzer, her polling firm and her employers, The Des Moines Register and its parent, Gannett, in what media lawyers see as a blatant effort to intimidate both the press and pollsters weeks before his inauguration.
It’s unclear whether Ms. Selzer will be on her own in bearing the cost of her defense. A spokeswoman for Gannett, which has called the lawsuit meritless, declined to comment on whether the company or the paper would shoulder those costs. Ms. Selzer declined to comment, remarking, “Right now, I’m focused on getting proper legal representation.”
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Ms. Selzer’s esteem in Iowa has long been bipartisan, born out of success in forecasting the victories of Republicans and Democrats alike, said David Kochel, a longtime Iowa Republican consultant.
“She has been very well respected by people from both sides over many, many, many years,” Mr. Kochel said. “The Iowa Poll has been the gold standard for such a long time.”
She had other misses before 2024: Her final poll of Iowa in 2004 had John Kerry, the Democrat, leading then-President George W. Bush by five percentage points, days before Mr. Bush eked out a win in the state by 0.07 points. But that was a different, less polarized, time.
Ms. Selzer’s victories far outnumber her losses, even when she was an outlier. In 2014, as other pollsters were predicting a triumph for the Democrat Bruce Braley in the race to succeed a retiring Democratic icon, Senator Tom Harkin, Ms. Selzer saw an easy victory for the Republican, Joni Ernst. She was right.
This November, when she jolted the nation with a poll that had Ms. Harris leading Mr. Trump 47 percent to 44 percent, it set off a torrent of predictions that the vice president could be swept to a convincing victory by angry women other polls may not have captured.
Mr. Trump ended up winning the state by more than 13 points.
“There was a lot of poll-herding going on in 2024; pollsters don’t like to be outliers,” Mr. Kochel said. “She had less fear of that because she made some calls where she was the outlier, and she won the bet. It finally caught up with her.”
Ms. Selzer, 68, was the consummate product of the Great Plains, born in Rochester, Minn., raised in Topeka, Kan., with a doctorate in communications theory from the University of Iowa. After graduation, she went to work for The Des Moines Register, where she oversaw virtually every poll conducted by the newspaper from 1987 to November 2024 and earned her reputation for understanding her state. She seemed to have a knack with Iowans, even with the caucusgoers who were famously hard to measure.
In a farewell column last month, Ms. Selzer defended her reputation and integrity, even as she owned up to her final whiff.
“Polling is a science of estimation, and science has a way of periodically humbling the scientist,” she wrote. “So, I’m humbled.”
For Mr. Trump, her humility is not enough. His lawsuit cited the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, claiming the poll defrauded voters to “create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris,” an act of “brazen election interference.”
Devereux Chatillon, a media lawyer in Mount Kisko, N.Y., scoffed at the legal claim. To use a business fraud statute, Mr. Trump’s lawyers would somehow have to show that the business in question — The Des Moines Register — fraudulently promoted a product, the vice president of the United States. And if the president-elect is suggesting that voters were somehow misled about that product, it clearly did not show up in the results of the election — not nationally and certainly not in Iowa, she said.
George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center, was similarly baffled.
“There’s no fraud unless it was intentionally deceptive,” he said. “Fraud is not just making a mistake.”
With its novel arguments, media lawyers and free-press advocates see the suit as a way to get around defamation laws that are exceptionally difficult to win for a man as famous as Mr. Trump. Invoking consumer fraud might not be a winning legal strategy, but it has one huge advantage. Under state consumer fraud statutes, state attorneys general typically can investigate and bring cases, as well as even intervene in existing cases. The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, a close ally of Mr. Trump’s, opened a fraud investigation in 2023 against the liberal group Media Matters that is still open.
Iowa’s conservative attorney general, Brenna Bird, has already shown a readiness to intervene on legal issues on behalf of Mr. Trump.
Win or lose, the legal action carries an unmistakable warning to any news outlet that dares to cross the next president: “This complaint is the latest in President-elect Trump’s history of using lawsuits to punish reporting he dislikes,” said Bruce D. Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Such legal fights are often protracted and costly, and even if the suit seems unlikely to prevail, as experts suggest, it can drain one’s finances to defeat it. .
For Ms. Selzer, the tragedy of the moment is the cloud under which she is retiring. Social media is replete with accusations from Trump supporters comparing Ms. Selzer to a cartoon “super villain” and spreading conspiracy theories that suggest Democratic operatives colluded with the pollster to yield her final poll result.
In an interview with Iowa journalists last month, she said she had been warned by the West Des Moines police of threats to her safety.
“If the police department knocks on your door and says your name has bubbled up, I take that seriously,” she said. “And I’m taking all available precautions.”
Mainly, she worries for her standing. “It’s more than annoying,” she said. “It is really a dig at my reputation.”
An analysis of her work by The New York Times dating to 1996 shows how accurate she has been, both in her polling ahead of the pivotal Iowa caucuses and the general elections. She foresaw Mr. Trump’s upset of Hillary Clinton in 2016. She caught Barack Obama’s support in the 2008 Iowa caucuses and revealed former Senator Rick Santorum’s late surge in 2012 that would put him on top of Mitt Romney for the win.
In six of the last eight Iowa polls, Ms. Selzer was within the margin of error of the actual result.
But she has long had her detractors — in both parties. Over her last eight final Iowa presidential polls, she revealed a slight but consistent lean toward Democrats, a lean that Republicans have capitalized on to castigate her and her employer, The Register, whose liberal editorial board has become increasingly out of step with the conservative state.
“There needs to be accountability,” Jeff Kaufmann, the Iowa Republican Party’s chairman, wrote on social media on Tuesday, backing Mr. Trump’s lawsuit. On Wednesday, he declared in a text, “I support President Trump 100 percent.”
Democrats have had their share of problems with Ms. Selzer. A snafu on the final poll ahead of the Iowa caucuses in 2020 sent Pete Buttigieg’s senior adviser, Lis Smith, into such a rage that the final Iowa Poll was shelved just days before voters went to the polls. By happenstance, one of Ms. Selzer’s pollsters called a Buttigieg organizer. When it came time to ask which Democrat she intended to vote for, the list of candidates did not include Mr. Buttigieg.
In her book “Any Given Tuesday,” Ms. Smith may have inadvertently provided fodder for Mr. Trump’s legal action, suggesting the results of the poll would help determine the outcome of the election.
“This was the most impactful and important poll in presidential primary politics. It would set the narrative for the caucuses, dominating the media coverage and dictating caucus choices,” she wrote. “I was beside myself.”
It is out of fear of crossing Mr. Trump that few Republican pollsters have publicly come to Ms. Selzer’s defense. A half dozen prominent Republican pollsters declined to comment for this article. “Know you gotta do the story, but count me as a pass,” said one in a typical response to an email inquiry.
In defending her integrity as a pollster, Ms. Selzer has not addressed the influence her polls might have had on election outcomes. But she has lamented the circumstances of her retirement, which she said was planned long before Election Day 2024.
“The unfortunate thing, of course, is that it comes after a spectacular miss, as I like to call it, rather than after one more spectacular hit,” she said last month. “Wouldn’t that have been better?”
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