That’s a great question that we’ll soon be forced to consider.
President-elect Trump, having recently won a defamation settlement from ABC News, has set his sights on other liberal media appendages that equally peddled disproven fake news during the election.
At the top of this list is Ann Selzer and her garbage Des Moines Register poll that dropped in October putting Kamala Harris an unbelievable three points ahead in Iowa. It was never going to happen, of course, and maybe that’s the point. Did Selzer knowingly put out the Kamala +3 number knowing full well it was fake? The alternative is that she truly believed in her heart of hearts that Iowa women would break in record numbers for Harris and carry her to a come-from-behind victory in the Hawkeye State.
Trump won Iowa by 14 points meaning Selzer’s poll was off by 17 in the end, a terrible showing for any pollster but especially egregious for someone with a so-called “sterling reputation” as one of the nation’s most respected opinion takers.
Selzer’s no dummy which makes it seem more plausible that she knew the rosy numbers for Harris were bogus but she put them out and defended them just to poke Trump in the eye.
Whether this ever goes to trial or gets dismissed before any action takes place is anyone’s guess, but the lawsuit has been filed:
Trump’s lawsuit, filed in Iowa state court in Polk County, accuses the outlet and pollster of violating Iowa’s consumer fraud laws by engaging in deception.
“Selzer’s polling ‘miss’ was not an astonishing coincidence — it was intentional,” the complaint states.
The lawsuit asks for an unspecified amount of damages and an order preventing the pollster from “releasing any further deceptive polls” and compelling them to disclose information they relied upon in publishing the November survey.
The question begs an answer. Is polling data released into the public domain considered free speech even if it’s embarrassingly wrong?
The lawsuit claims that Selzer and many others in the left-wing polling cabal use their numbers to influence opinion rather than reflect it, an obvious truth:
“For too long, left-wing pollsters have attempted to influence electoral outcomes through manipulated polls that have unacceptable error rates and are not grounded in widely accepted polling methodologies,” the lawsuit states.
“While Selzer is not the only pollster to engage in this corrupt practice, she had a huge platform and following and, thus, a significant and impactful opportunity to deceive voters,” it continued.
Even though it’s blatantly clear that media outlets use polls to manipulate the public, It seems like this case will have a tough time going very far. It’s hard to single out Selzer among the list of bad polls and decide that her poll deserves a lawsuit and damages owed to Trump. Granted, she’s an avowed Democrat and admitted Trump hater, a combination that makes it almost irresistible for her to use her power to fight against another Trump presidency.
Gannett, the parent company of the Des Moines Register, responded:
“We have acknowledged that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll did not reflect the ultimate margin of President Trump’s Election Day victory in Iowa by releasing the poll’s full demographics, crosstabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer,” Lark-Marie Anton, a Gannett spokesperson, said in a statement.
That may be the key right there. Selzer released the poll crosstabs which demonstrated how she arrived at her inaccurate top-line numbers. Anyone looking at the poll for two seconds could see it was implausible, but the data is there to support it.
Essentially, Selzer had two options. She could have tossed the data out and gone back into the field to poll again or release the data she gathered. She chose the latter and let the chips fall where they may.
Selzer was probably elated that the data showed a Harris +3 victory in Iowa despite knowing full well that was never going to happen. It gave her cover to release the poll and offer up the cross tabs as evidence of what might happen on Election Day.
The thing that will likely protect Selzer is that the poll is no poll is offered as fact but merely presented as a scientific survey of what might happen if this particular field of poll respondents showed up to vote.
None of this is to say that left-wing rags like the Des Moines Register don’t deserve punishment for the way they misrepresent and attack Donald Trump at every turn. That punishment, however, is already coming in the form of eyeballs looking elsewhere for news and information. Public trust in legacy media outlets fell off a cliff this year and may never recover.
In short, Trump is already winning this battle based solely on the decline in readership experienced by left-leaning partisan news outlets.
Selzer will likely escape legal jeopardy on this one but the damage to her reputation, ego, and polling in general caused by her own decisions, will stand forever.
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