An Iowa district court has dismissed a lawsuit by President Donald Trump against pollster J. Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register, saying the Iowa poll and the newspaper’s reporting were fully protected political speech.
The case centered on a poll conducted by Selzer and published by the Register three days before the 2024 presidential election that showed then-Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump by three percentage points among likely voters in the state.
Trump won Iowa by about 13 percentage points that year. In his lawsuit against Selzer, Trump alleged that her poll constituted “fraud” and that the Register published the poll to “grab national and international headlines.”
In a decision Wednesday, Judge Scott J. Beattie wrote that election polling is protected by the First Amendment “because it involves a conversation between a pollster and a voter and because the poll itself is speech.” Beattie dismissed the case with prejudice, which means Trump cannot bring the same claim to court again.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which led Selzer’s defense, said in a statement that the First Amendment does not allow anyone in government to punish people under the banner of “fake news.”
“That may work for [Trump] as a campaign slogan, but it is not a thing in the law,” FIRE chief counsel Bob Corn-Revere said.
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