Donald Trump's attempt to turn a badly missed election poll into an “election interference” lawsuit has been thrown out of court.
On September 23, Iowa District Judge Scott J. Beattie dismissed Trump's lawsuit against The Des Moines Register, its parent company and veteran pollster J. Ann Selzer, rejecting the argument that an inaccurate political poll could be treated as consumer fraud.
The dispute dates back to the final days of the 2024 presidential campaign.
Just three days before Election Day, the highly regarded Iowa Poll produced a stunning result: Kamala Harris led Trump among likely Iowa voters, 47 percent to 44 percent.
The poll was spectacularly wrong.
Trump ultimately carried Iowa by more than 13 percentage points.
But Trump didn't simply criticize the poll's methodology or celebrate proving it wrong at the ballot box.
He sued.
Trump accused Selzer and the newspaper of deliberately publishing misleading polling in an effort to damage his campaign and help Harris, characterizing the poll as a form of election interference.
His lawsuit attempted to use Iowa's consumer fraud laws to hold the newspaper and pollster legally responsible.
Judge Beattie rejected that argument.
The central issue wasn't whether the Iowa Poll had been accurate. Clearly, it wasn't.
The issue was whether publishing an election poll—even one that turns out to be dramatically wrong—could constitute the kind of fraud Trump alleged.
The court concluded it could not.
Beattie determined that political polling and reporting sit at the heart of speech protected by the First Amendment.
He also rejected the attempt to transform political predictions into legally actionable statements of fact.
Polls, forecasts and predictions necessarily involve uncertainty. They take available information, apply methodology and attempt to estimate something that has not happened yet.
They aren't guarantees.
Perhaps the most remarkable part of Beattie's decision was how far he went in testing Trump's argument.
For purposes of deciding whether the lawsuit could survive, the judge considered Trump's allegations under an assumption favorable to the plaintiffs—even assuming that the poll had intentionally been skewed and its results fabricated.
The claims still failed.
The lawsuit simply did not satisfy the legal requirements necessary to establish the fraud and consumer-deception claims Trump was attempting to bring.
Beattie also warned about the broader consequences of allowing such litigation to proceed.
Permitting legally deficient lawsuits targeting political reporting could discourage journalists, pollsters and others from participating in public debate because of the expense and burden of defending themselves in court.
That concern reaches well beyond one inaccurate poll.
Political polling gets things wrong.
Sometimes badly.
Pollsters use samples, turnout models, weighting and assumptions to estimate what millions of people will eventually do inside voting booths. Those estimates can be useful, and they can also fail spectacularly.
The Iowa Poll failed spectacularly.
But being wrong isn't the same thing as committing fraud.
And an inaccurate prediction isn't automatically election interference simply because a candidate doesn't like the result.
The ruling is particularly notable because Trump's lawsuit was never really about proving that the Iowa Poll was inaccurate.
Election Day had already done that.
Trump won Iowa decisively.
Instead, the lawsuit sought to impose legal liability on the people who produced and published the incorrect prediction.
The court refused to make that leap.
The case was dismissed with prejudice at the trial-court level, meaning the plaintiffs cannot simply refile the same claims in that court and start again.
Trump's attorneys have indicated they intend to appeal the decision to the Iowa Supreme Court, so the broader legal fight may not be finished.
But for now, the result is straightforward.
The poll was wrong.
Trump won Iowa.
And the First Amendment still protected the publication of the poll.