President-elect Donald Trump is suing a well-respected pollster and the newspaper that has published her polls, alleging that a survey she conducted during the 2024 presidential election amounted to “interference” in the race.

The lawsuit, filed on Monday night, targets pollster Ann Selzer, The Des Moines Register (where her poll has been published for years) and the paper’s parent company, Gannett. The suit states that it is seeking “accountability for brazen election interference” and claims that the pollster and the paper engaged in “election-interfering fiction” in publishing an outlier poll days before the election took place.

“Defendants and their cohorts in the Democrat [sic] Party hoped that the [Kamala] Harris Poll would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election,” the lawsuit alleges.

Trump’s legal team purports that Selzer, the paper and Gannett violated the state-based Consumer Fraud Act, which forbids misrepresentations “in connection with the advertisement, sale or lease of consumer merchandise or the solicitation of contributions for charitable purposes.”

There appears to be no evidence substantiating the Trump legal team’s claims. A spokesperson from The Des Moines Register said the paper “stand[s] by our reporting on the matter and believe this lawsuit is without merit.”

Polling is not a perfect science, and outliers are always a possibility. If a poll has a margin of error of five percentage points, for example, it means that either Candidate A’s or Candidate B’s numbers could fluctuate in either direction up to that number. Polls also have a stated confidence level, generally around 95 percent, which means that, 19 out of 20 times a poll is replicated, a pollster can expect the same results. However, 1 in 20 times, the poll may be completely off.

Polls are also snapshots of what voters are feeling at the moment, and it is possible for voters to change their views between when the poll is conducted and the date of the election.

Selzer’s polls have generally been well-regarded, and she accurately predicted Trump winning the state of Iowa in both 2016 and in 2020. Her poll........

© Truthout