Editorial: You won, Mr. Trump. There's no call for litigation against the Des Moines Register

The Editorial Board, Chicago Tribune on Dec 23, 2024

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Let’s stipulate this up front: The Des Moines Register’s poll of the presidential race in Iowa that was published just days before the election was miles off the mark.

The poll, overseen by veteran pollster Ann Selzer, shockingly had Democrat Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by three points in a state everyone assumed Trump would win easily. And, sure enough, once actual votes were tallied, he did indeed win in a breeze, topping Harris by 13 points.

The results were so inaccurate that Selzer retired from election polling afterward, an appropriate move in light of such a high-profile miss.

Still, despite his easy Iowa win and sweep of every battleground state as he cruised to a second term, Trump has chosen to go after Selzer, the Register and parent company Gannett with a lawsuit alleging the polling error amounted to a violation of Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act.

Trump easily could have gotten in some much-deserved verbal digs at Selzer and the Register and then moved on to attending to business that affects Americans’ actual lives. Instead, the Trump grievance machine keeps humming. Even in victory.

We’re confident this lawsuit ultimately will go nowhere, as numerous legal experts predicted in various outlets that covered this news. Indeed, the very idea that a wayward poll amounts to consumer fraud is quite a stretch. The term typically applies to ripoffs of consumers by companies — misleading marketing, bait-and-switch offers and the like. A poll that turns out wrong — even one as off-base as that of the Des Moines Register — hardly amounts to consumer fraud. That’s just common sense.

There’s little doubt that, beyond punishing Selzer and the newspaper, a secondary goal of Trump and whoever is paying his lawyers to bring this frivolous action is to make other publishers afraid to criticize him or reluctant to report negative news on him or his administration. That’s un-American.

The Des Moines Register is highly respected and venerable, founded in 1860. This front-page poll was an embarrassment to the paper and to Selzer. Both have paid in the court of public opinion for the error. That’s the appropriate level of accountability for what happened. Selzer was so respected a pollster, it’s inconceivable that she would have falsified or otherwise tampered with her results. We take Selzer at her word that she simply got things wrong. She hardly was alone.

You handily won the election, Mr. President-elect. Congratulations. Even for someone whose impulse long has been to punch back at your foes, real or imagined, there’s plenty of room here for you to rise above all petty bids for retribution.

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