Three days before the 2024 election, the Des Moines Register published its Iowa Poll, conducted by J. Ann Selzer, showing Kamala Harris ahead of Trump in Iowa by 47 to 44. Trump won the state with 56 percent of about two million votes. In December 2024 he sued Selzer, her firm, the Register and its parent company Gannett under Iowa's consumer fraud law. On September 23, 2026, Judge Scott J. Beattie of the Iowa District Court for Polk County dismissed the case with prejudice in a 64-page ruling.
The ruling does not rest on whether the poll was any good. Beattie wrote that the case fails even if he assumed, for the sake of the motion, everything Trump's side alleged about it: “Even with this assumption, each of the three counts still fails.” His reasoning is that a poll is not the kind of statement that can be true or false in the way fraud law requires. “A poll is simply an estimate. A poll reports responses from a sample of voters and includes a reported margin of error. It is based on a known methodology, and concerns an event that has not yet happened. Things of that nature are not the sort of things that can be said to be true or false in the manner required by the fraud exception.” And more broadly: “A statement of conjecture about a future state of affairs is not provably false, even when the speaker is alleged to have known better.”
The second, independent ground is that the constitutional fraud exception “reaches lies told to obtain money or property,” where a misrepresentation induces the plaintiff “to part with money, or property of value, in reliance upon it. None of that has been pleaded here.”
Beattie addressed the politics of the case directly and set them aside: “This case sets a president, a member of Congress, and a former state senator against a pollster and a newspaper, and it arises out of an election. A case of that kind invites the reader to look for a political result. The court's role is narrower. It is to sit as an impartial arbiter, to apply the law without passion or prejudice, and to rule without regard to the politics of the day.” He also wrote that the identity of the plaintiff does not change the analysis: “Under First Amendment principles, the identity of the party seeking the court to sanction speech is irrelevant. What matters is whether state law, applied by a state court's judgment, will be used to do so.” His conclusion: the petition “seeks to stretch both Iowa statutory and common law beyond their current bounds, turning speech that enjoys the highest category of First Amendment protection into a liability.”
Selzer said afterward that “polling is a social science, not clairvoyance, and no responsible pollster can guarantee an election outcome,” and that “what we can guarantee is that we will follow the data wherever it leads, even when the results are uncomfortable or unexpected.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which represented her, argued that winning was never the point: “This was never about 'consumer fraud.' Nor was it about winning in court. Trump's lawsuit was about intimidating perceived critics into silence by making them waste time and money on lawyers to defend perfectly legal speech. In other words, the lawsuit is the punishment.” Iowa enacted an anti-SLAPP statute in 2025; according to FIRE, Trump filed hours before it took effect.
A Trump legal spokesman rejected the ruling and said the case will be appealed to the Iowa Supreme Court, restating the original allegation: the newspaper and Gannett “knowingly ran a phony poll from the now disgraced Democrat pollster Ann Selzer in an unlawful attempt to interfere in the 2024 presidential election.” The dismissal is with prejudice, so an appeal is the only route left.
The ruling landed the same day a federal judge in Washington heard argument over the White House ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico. See Trump Says 'Fake and Fraudulent Polling' Should Be 'Virtually, a Criminal Offence' and Adds a Times Poll to His Lawsuit and Trump Bans CNN, MS NOW and Politico From the White House, and the Next Morning the Secret Service Took Their Reporters' Badges.