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The First Amendment protects speech about political affairs, even when officials — whether it’s your local mayor or the President of the United States — claim it’s false. That’s been true since America’s youth, when American jurors  a British governor’s attempt to use libel laws to censor a newspaper and Thomas Jefferson pushed back against the , which criminalized criticism of the government.

J. Ann Selzer is a renowned Iowa pollster, known in particular for her work with the Des Moines Register on the Iowa Poll. Selzer’s polls have frequently been outliers — for example,  Obama’s surge in the 2008 Iowa caucuses, Republican Sen. Joni Ernst’s  over her Democratic challenger in 2014, and Donald Trump’s  and  wins in Iowa. Her final 2024 poll of Iowa, showing a narrow Harris lead, was also an outlier, but this time Trump beat expectations, handily winning the state.

After Trump comfortably won, pollster Selzer owned up to the margin between her poll and the eventual outcome of Trump comfortably winning Iowa. She acknowledged the “biggest miss of my career” and did what good pollsters do: She explained her methodology and publicly shared the poll’s  (results reported out by demographic and attitudinal subgroups), its questionnaire (with  and ), and her , . 

Nevertheless, Trump filed a punitive lawsuit against pollster J. Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register, arguing that publishing a poll finding Kamala Harris in the lead amounted to “consumer fraud.” Trump seeks triple monetary damages and an injunction against the publication of future “deceptive” polls.

Trump’s lawsuit, which he claimed was going to “,” is simply another attempt to claim that “false” political speech can be punished by the government through its courts. But the government’s ability to punish “false” speech is exceedingly narrow (defamation, for example, is not protected) and none of the few circumstances where “false” speech can be regulated are applicable here. Publishing a poll — a snapshot of potential voter sentiment at a particular point in time — is not “consumer fraud” under Iowa’s , which is geared toward conduct like rolling back the odometer on a used car. Nor is it “interference” with an election under , which is limited to conduct like submitting a “counterfeit official election ballot” and other forms of direct interference with the conduct of an election. Publishing a poll is protected speech under the First Amendment.

In keeping with  by Donald Trump, the lawsuit is a SLAPP — a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, the legal tactic of filing a baseless lawsuit and forcing a defendant to spend time and money to get it dismissed. SLAPP suits are intended to make it costly to criticize the plaintiff (even if the plaintiff loses), chilling speech. While some states have anti-SLAPP statutes that deter such suits by forcing a losing plaintiff to pay the defendants’ attorney’s fees, Iowa does not have such a statute.

FIRE came to Selzer’s defense, providing her with free legal representation to fight the lawsuit. In doing so, ��ݮ��ƵAPP���� is helping to mitigate the harm of SLAPPs by taking the cost of attorneys’ fees off the table. When you have to pay attorneys’ fees to defend your free speech, your speech is not free.

(On January 6, 2025, the Center for American Rights filed a second lawsuit against Selzer and the Register. ��ݮ��ƵAPP���� is also representing Selzer and her company in that lawsuit. You can read more about that lawsuit here.)