Trump’s lawsuit against Iowa pollster, newspaper tossed by judge

By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Thursday, September 24, 2026

An Iowa judge has shut down President Trump’s lawsuit against Iowa pollster Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register, saying their flawed survey work is protected by the First Amendment.

Ms. Selzer’s final poll of the 2026 campaign, published by the newspaper the weekend before the election, showed Democrat Kamala Harris leading Mr. Trump by 3 percentage points. Mr. Trump would go on to win the state by 13.3 points.

Mr. Trump said the poll was so “implausible” that it never should have been run and suggested the results may have been deliberately manipulated.

But Iowa District Judge Scott J. Beattie, in his ruling on Wednesday, said opinion polls aren’t matters of truth or falsity, but rather political speech.

“Election polling is speech protected by the First Amendment, both because it involves a conversation between a pollster and a voter and because the poll itself is speech,” he wrote. “Reporting such a poll during a presidential and congressional election year is speech about a matter of public concern, occupying the summit of the pyramid of First Amendment values.”

The loss is the latest in a string of court setbacks for Mr. Trump in his battles against the press.

On Thursday morning, a federal judge in Washington issued a restraining order against the White House directing it to restore press credentials to journalists from CNN, MS Now and Politico.

Mr. Trump’s defamation lawsuits against The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have also lost.

The president was joined in his polling lawsuit by Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, an Iowa Republican whom Ms. Selzer’s poll, three days before the election, also showed losing to her Democratic opponent in 2024. That forecast, too, was wrong.

Ms. Selzer said she was ceasing polling in the wake of her botched survey.

Mr. Trump and Ms. Miller-Meeks claimed the poll was so deceptive that it violated Iowa fraud laws.

Judge Beattie said that went too far.

“At its core, the plaintiffs’ 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,” he wrote. “After considering the parties’ arguments, the court must conclude that the protection is too great and the reach is too far.”