Des Moines Register Responds to Trump’s Deranged Lawsuit

The Des Moines Register, which published the infamous Selzer poll, has responded to Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the paper.

“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, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer,” a spokesperson for the Register said, according to CBS’s Jennifer Jacobs. “We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit.”

Trump on Monday sued The Des Moines Register as well as veteran pollster J. Ann Selzer over a preelection poll that showed him losing the state to Kamala Harris.

“I’m going to be bringing [a lawsuit] against, uh, the people in Iowa,” Trump announced earlier on Monday. “Their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time … then just before the election she said I was going to lose by three or four points, and it became the biggest story all over the world,” the president-elect said. “It was fraud, and it was election interference.”

The Selzer poll, published on November 2, shockingly predicted Harris would win Iowa by three points. Trump ended up easily winning Iowa by 13 points, a glaring mistake for the respected pollster. Seltzer retired shortly after, although she had been planning to do so regardless of the election’s outcome.

Trump’s lawsuit is overindulgent, at best, and most legal experts don’t expect it to stick.

“This absurd lawsuit is a direct assault on the First Amendment,” Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression chief counsel Robert Corn-Revere told CNN. “Newspapers and polling firms are not engaged in ‘deceptive practices’ just because they publish stories and poll results President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t like. Getting a poll wrong is not election interference or fraud.”