An Iowa judge dismissed President Donald Trump’s lawsuit Wednesday against the Des Moines Register and pollster J. Ann Selzer over a 2024 Iowa poll that inaccurately showed then-Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris leading Trump in the state.
Selzer’s poll, released days before the 2024 election, predicted Kamala Harris would win the key swing state of Iowa; Trump went on to win the state by 13 percentage points. The president sued Selzer the Des Moines Register and Gannett in December, a month after he beat Harris in the election. Selzer, a veteran pollster who has her work consistently cited by media outlets, had a “significant and impactful opportunity to deceive voters” with her incorrect poll, Trump’s initial lawsuit claimed. The lawsuit also said the poll “was not reality, it was election-interfering fiction.”
Polk County District Judge Scott Beattie granted motions to dismiss filed by Selzer and Selzer & Company, as well as the Des Moines Register and its parent company, Gannett Co., in a ruling issued Wednesday.
Trump’s team alleged violations of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, fraudulent misrepresentation and negligent misrepresentation. The plaintiffs also sought to prevent the defendants from publishing additional allegedly deceptive polls.
In his ruling, Beattie said the plaintiffs’ claims attempted to turn constitutionally protected speech into legal liability. “At its core, the Plaintiffs’ Petition seeks to stretch both Iowa statutory and common law beyond their current bounds, turning speech that enjoys the highest category of First Amendment protection into a liability,” he wrote. “The case must therefore be dismissed.”
Beattie ruled that the poll and the Register’s reporting on it constituted protected political speech under the First Amendment. He rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that the poll should be treated as commercial speech because it was commissioned and published by for-profit companies.
“Election polling is speech protected by the First Amendment, both because it involves a conversation between a pollster and a voter and because the poll itself is speech,” the judge wrote. He added that reporting on the poll during a presidential and congressional election year was “speech about a matter of public concern, occupying the summit of the pyramid of First Amendment values.”
The judge also said that the fact that a poll turned out to be inaccurate did not, by itself, make it a provably false statement of fact under the legal standards applicable to the case.
“A poll is simply an estimate,” Beattie wrote. “A poll reports responses from a sample of voters and includes a reported margin of error.” He characterized polls as “snapshots with margins of error” concerning an election that had not yet occurred.
“A statement of conjecture about a future state of affairs is not provably false, even when the speaker is alleged to have known better,” he wrote.
Selzer was defended pro bono by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free speech advocacy group.
“We’re pleased that the court recognized what we’ve said all along: This lawsuit was laughable from the beginning and never should have been brought,” FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere, who led Selzer’s defense, said in a statement. “The First Amendment does not allow anyone in government, least of all the president, to punish people under the banner of ‘fake news.’ That may work for him as a campaign slogan, but it is not a thing in the law.” Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
The dismissal was entered with prejudice, meaning the claims cannot be refiled in the same form. The court also denied the plaintiffs’ request to enjoin the publication of future polls.
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