Opinion | Trump's suit against a legendary pollster could spell disaster for the whole industry

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

57% : In reality, Trump won Iowa by eight points that year.
55% : Selzer whiffed in 2024 -- predicting that Kamala Harris would win Iowa by three points, days before Trump won by 13 points.
48% : Donald Trump sent a shock wave through the polling industry -- not by beating his polls (as he often has) but by suing a legendary pollster.
47% : Trump is going after Ann Selzer, a highly respected pollster who predicted Barack Obama's meteoric rise in the 2008 Iowa Democratic caucuses and saw Trump's strength in 2020 when others underestimated him.
45% : Trump doesn't need to sue every pollster to change the shape of the industry.
38% : If Trump really wanted to understand why Selzer's poll missed, he could start with her post-mortem.
38% : But Trump isn't just suing Selzer.
38% : Some pollsters will stop publishing any surprising results out of fear of political retribution.
32% : Her most striking finding: In her poll, self-reported Biden 2020 voters outnumbered Trump 2020 voters, 41% to 40%.
28% : That is, we believe that Republicans or Trump's 2020 voters are less likely to respond to polls than Democrats, so we expect the initial data to underestimate Trump.
24% : But the fact that Trump brought the lawsuit at all is troubling.
19% : If politicians like Trump enter that feedback loop, they could seriously damage the industry.
6% : Selzer calculated that if she had weighted her poll to get a more reasonable balance of Trump's and Biden's 2020 supporters, Trump would have led Harris in her poll by six points -- erasing more than half of her 16 point error.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.