President Donald Trump on June 30 dropped his federal lawsuit against the Des Moines Register, pollster Ann Selzer, and related defendants and refiled it in Iowa state court.
The new complaint renews his claims that a poll conducted and published shortly before the 2024 presidential election was intentionally misleading and designed to sway voters against him.
Trump’s legal team filed the petition in Iowa District Court for Polk County on the same day they voluntarily dismissed their federal case in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa.
The state complaint echoes the allegations raised in Trump’s original federal lawsuit filed in December 2024, alleging violations of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act.
Both complaints allege state law violations due to “brazen election interference” against Trump in the presidential race against then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
At the heart of the dispute is the final Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll, conducted by Selzer & Company and published in the register on Nov. 2, 2024, just three days before Election Day. The poll showed Harris leading Trump by 47 percent to 44 percent in Iowa—a result at odds with the state’s Republican leaning and other polling at the time.
Ultimately, Trump won Iowa by roughly 13 points, leading him and his co-plaintiffs, U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) and former Republican state Sen. Bradley Zaun, to allege that the poll’s findings were fabricated to depress GOP voter enthusiasm and create a false sense of momentum for Harris.
In their latest state complaint, Trump’s lawyers characterize the poll as “utterly wrong and intentionally misleading,” calling it an act of “election-interfering fiction” that allegedly defies any innocent explanation or statistical margin of error.
The suit seeks damages and asks the court to bar the defendants from engaging in further allegedly deceptive practices, as well as to compel disclosure of information and data underlying the contested poll results.
Selzer, who announced her retirement shortly after the 2024 election, has defended her methods and addressed the poll’s miss in a public post-election review.
In that report, she acknowledged the discrepancy as the “biggest miss of my career” but said internal analysis revealed no evidence of deliberate error or tampering. Selzer floated several theories—including demographic skews, late voter shifts, turnout surprises, and inadvertent weighting errors—but ultimately concluded that no single factor explained the poll’s substantial deviation from the actual election result.
Trump’s dismissal of the federal lawsuit triggered immediate opposition from the defendants and their legal representatives. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which represents Selzer, accused Trump of engaging in “procedural gamesmanship” by moving the case to state court just one day before Iowa’s new anti-SLAPP law took effect on July 1.
Anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) statutes are designed to deter lawsuits perceived as intended to chill free speech, including speech by journalists and pollsters.
“This maneuver was not in response to any settlement and is a transparent attempt to avoid federal court review of the president’s transparently frivolous claims,” FIRE said in a statement.
The defendants also filed motions to strike Trump’s notice of voluntary dismissal in federal court, arguing that the dismissal was legally ineffective because an appeal related to the federal proceedings was already pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
They described the moves by Trump’s legal team as “improper and invalid procedural maneuvering to avoid this Court’s jurisdiction as well as adverse actions by the federal courts.”
The Des Moines Register has stood by its reporting on the poll and called Trump’s lawsuit meritless. In an earlier statement to The Epoch Times, the newspaper acknowledged the poll failed to predict the ultimate margin of Trump’s victory but emphasized its transparency in releasing full demographic data, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted results, and a technical explanation from Selzer.
Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
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