Speaking in a press conference from his Mar-a-Lago home on Monday, December 16, President-elect Donald Trump announced that his team is making a major legal move against both embattled Iowa pollster Ann Selzer and the paper the Des Moines Register, alleging “fraud” in their wildly incorrect state-level polling right before election day.
In the video, the president-elect accuses Selzer and the local paper of having interfered with the poll’s wildly incorrect results to interfere in the 2024 election, arguing that they tried to shape voter behavior by attempting to depress pro-Trump voters with bad news. He also commented on his plans to sue CBS’s 60 Minutes over its editing of an answer from VP Harris in a way he claims was meant to make her look better.
Speaking about the suit and the pollster, President-elect Trump said that he would be suing both Ann Selzer and the paper for which she worked, the Des Moines register. He said, announcing that move, “I’m going to be bringing [a lawsuit] against the people in Iowa, their newspaper, which had a very, very good pollster who got me right all the time.”
Continuing, and explaining what Selzer claimed her poll found, a result that was wildly incorrect and he thinks was manipulated to make him look worse, the president-elect said, “And 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 because I was going to win Iowa by 20 points.”
On that same point, he reminded listeners of what Selzer claimed her poll found, noting that it was a shockingly bad result for him that surprised many poll watchers. He said, “She brought it down very smartly to four a couple of weeks before, and everyone said, ‘Wow, that’s amazing, he’s only up by four points.’”
Then, insisting that Selzer knew what she was doing and thus that the wildly incorrect answer had to be faked rather than just a mistake, Trump said, “It was their parent, and, in my opinion, it was fraud, and it was election interference. You know, she’s gotten me right, always. She’s a very good pollster. She knows what she was doing.”
And, commenting on his suit against CBS based on its editing of a Kamala Harris answer on “60 MInutes” in a way that critics contended was calculated to make Kamala look better, Trump said, “We’re filing one on 60 Minutes. You know about that where they took Kamala’s answer—which was a crazy answer, horrible answer—and they took the whole answer out.” Watch Trump here:
Lark-Marie Anton, a representative of the Des Moines Register, issued a statement regarding the issue. Anton remarked that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll did not accurately represent the final margin of President Trump’s victory on Election Day in Iowa. To address this, the publication has made available the complete demographics, crosstabs, both weighted and unweighted data, along with a technical explanation provided by pollster Ann Selzer. The Des Moines Register maintains its position on the reporting and asserts that the lawsuit lacks merit.
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