Donald Trump lost his lawsuit against the Des Moines Register, Gannett, and pollster J. Ann Selzer on Wednesday after an Iowa judge dismissed claims tied to a pre election poll that incorrectly showed Kamala Harris ahead in Iowa. The poll was released days before the 2024 election, which Trump won in the state by 13 percentage points. Trump filed the case in December, one month after defeating Harris, accusing Selzer and the news organizations of misleading voters through a poll he described as election interference. His legal team cited Iowa’s Consumer Fraud Act, fraudulent misrepresentation, and negligent misrepresentation while also seeking to block future polls they considered deceptive. The Judge Was Not Buying It Polk County District Judge Scott Beattie granted dismissal motions from Selzer, Selzer and Company, the Des Moines Register, and parent company Gannett Co. Beattie ruled that election polling and reporting about the poll qualified as political speech protected by the First Amendment, rejecting Trump’s argument that the poll should be treated as commercial speech simply because for profit companies commissioned or published it. Beattie also said an inaccurate poll is not automatically a legally provable false statement. His reasoning was bluntly grounded in how polling works: surveys are estimates based on samples of voters, include margins of error, and offer a snapshot of an election that has not happened yet. In other words, the poll was wrong, but the court found that being wrong did not turn it into a fraud case.