SAUNDERS: Trump revenge tour strikes at easy target: Awful Iowa poll

The Des Moines Register headline read: “Iowa Poll: Kamala Harris leapfrogs Donald Trump to take lead near Election Day. Here’s how.” The poll ran three days before the Nov. 5 vote and gave Harris a 3-point edge after surveying some 800 likely Iowa voters.

Then reality intruded. On Election Day, instead of the poll’s expected 47-44 result that favored Harris, Trump garnered 56 percent of the Iowa vote, and Harris lost with 42.7 percent. The Iowa Poll was double-digit wrong.

As part of his revenge tour, Trump filed a lawsuit Monday against pollster J. Ann Selzer, The Des Moines Register and Register parent company Gannett. The lawsuit charged the poll was not a miss “but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election.”

The New York Times sees the lawsuit as a threat of “retaliation” against mainstream media.

I don’t think a president should sue newspapers that cover him, because there’s this little thing called the First Amendment. But there is no denying the botched Iowa Poll made a juicy target for Team Trump.

Selzer and company should have seen the red lights flashing in the Hawkeye State.

Hello. Iowa is a red state.

Gov. Kim Reynolds is a Republican. Both U.S. senators from Iowa — Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst — and all four House members are Republicans. The state’s House and Senate are controlled by Republicans.

Trump won Iowa handily in 2016 and 2020.

Previous 2024 Iowa Polls showed Trump beating both President Joe Biden and Harris.

Trump’s lawyers are engaging in an unusual legal approach: They’re citing the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act, which says “a person shall not engage in a practice or act the person knows or reasonably should know is an unfair practice, deception, fraud, false pretense, or false promise,” or misrepresentation of material facts.

Trump doesn’t have to win in court for this maneuver to pay off.

This is conservative lawfare that shines a harsh light on the warning signs Selzer and company ignored.

As James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute told me, if Harris was going to win Iowa by 3 points, other polls would have suggested she was going to win the national popular vote by 8 or more points.

So what went wrong? An honest mistake, an intentionally misleading survey, or, as I suspect, an honest mistake facilitated by liberal bias?

Pollsters will tell you that about one in 20 polls can be outliers — it’s the nature of the game — but that doesn’t mean that pollsters can’t express skepticism when results obtained in good faith seem out of whack.

Former Republican pollster Arnold Steinberg told me that when a poll seems off, pollsters are “dutibound to publish it because it’s a real poll they did.” Pollsters shouldn’t withhold polls that defy their expectations, but they can and should register skepticism based on past results and other data. Didn’t happen here.

Piereson wrote in The New Criterion, “The Selzer poll, with a margin of error of 3.4, missed the real outcome by 16 points, or by as many as five standard deviations from the true result as revealed on election day.

“What are the odds of drawing such a sample by legitimate means? Answer: roughly one time in 3.5 million trials. In other words, given these odds, the results in the Iowa poll likely did not come about by ‘honest error.’”

And it doesn’t help that X account @IllinoisLib announced the poll’s results 45 minutes before the poll went public, according to the website Semafor, which means someone on the inside leaked it in an attempt to help Harris.

The tweet read:

“Selzer is about to drop Kamala +3

Source: Major campaign surrogate

Not joking. Mark my words.”

Selzer has taken umbrage at critics who have accused her of deliberately stacking the deck. “They’re saying that this was election interference, which is a crime,” she told Iowa PBS.

I don’t think Trump will or should prevail with this novel lawsuit, but Selzer has given the voting public another reason to distrust the media. And that’s a crime.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.