Back in 2018, I launched a podcast very loosely tied to what I’ve done for a living for many years, and so I called it “Shaping Opinion.” The very first topic I sought to cover was how political polls are used to shape public opinion and influence the vote.
Needless to say, I didn’t get any takers who were willing to put themselves out there on this issue, and not just in that first year. This has always been one of those topics I’ve been ready to seize on if any new studies or indisputable proof would come up that would give me a chance to dig in. But no matter who I approached, people got awful shy on this one, especially after the presidential race of 2020.
Of course, this is one of those topics where you can trust your own eyes and ears, and your powers of observation over time. In every presidential election cycle, Democrats are over-sampled and Republicans are not. Pollsters say there are reasons for this, but they never tell the full truth.
You can count on public polls telling you early and often that the Democrat candidate is dominating. At some point around the conventions, polls will say each candidate saw a “post-convention bounce,” but the Republican candidate’s bump is always temporary and fleeting. The Democrat candidate’s bounce is always framed as the start of the home-stretch run where he or she is a likely winner.
This is to condition the voters into assuming the Democrat will win. Social psychologists often say that most people like a winner, so for many, once they have a sense from the polls who the likely winner will be, that’s who they decide to vote for.
Anyone with common sense who has seen this pattern over at least three election cycles can detect for themselves that polls are commonly used to shape opinion, not reflect it.
So last year, when a well-respected pollster from Iowa named J. Ann Selzer published her final numbers for “The Iowa Poll” three days before election day, many of us were extremely curious. She released what was the final Des Moines Register presidential election poll, which had Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by three points.
Fox News called this a “shock poll” that “showed a seven-point shift from Trump to Harris from September, when he had a four-point lead over the vice president in the same poll.”
Trump scores legal win, getting lawsuit against Iowa pollster, Des Moines Register moved to state court | Brian Flood, Fox News
— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) October 26, 2025
Trump’s legal team alleges 'election interference' after late-stage poll showed Kamala Harris ahead in Iowa
President Donald Trump notched a legal… pic.twitter.com/WcsdG3QTyx
The rest of the media, propagandizing for a possible Harris victory, amplified this poll as much as it could in an obvious attempt to sway voters. Legacy media told us there was a gigantic shift in favor of Harris.
That turned out to be so untrue, so impossible to bury, that heads had to roll. Trump overwhelmed Harris in Iowa by over 13 percentage points. It was the third time he won that state in his three runs for the White House. It was the first time a presidential candidate took the state by double digits in 44 years. Not long after that, with only a vague explanation, Selzer resigned.
Our own Scott Pinsker covered this just after it happened, and noted:
“In her resignation column, Selzer claimed she told the Des Moines Register that she wouldn’t be renewing her 2024 contract before her last poll was even released. I suppose she included this information so nobody would think she was fired, but it also builds a circumstantial case of culpability: If Selzer knew she was quitting from election polls, what did she have to lose by putting her fingers on the scale and trying to manipulate the outcome?
It’s worth noting that Selzer’s last eight Iowa polls ALL exaggerated the Democrat’s strength and downplayed the Republican’s.”
Selzer’s resignation caught the attention of President-elect Trump, who never takes anything lying down, not even in victory. He called for an investigation of the whole situation, and he later sued.
This week Trump’s lawsuit moved one step forward. In what has been touted as an incremental legal victory, an appeals court overruled a lower court, which had denied Trump’s legal team’s request to move the case to Iowa State Court.
Specifically, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit overruled an Obama-appointed federal judge who wanted to “remove” the case to federal court. A cynic might presume it’s easier to stack the deck against Trump in federal court, where you have a number of Obama and Biden appointees hanging out.
But the Court of Appeals made it clear when it granted the Trump team’s “petition for a writ of mandamus.” This is a judicial order that is used to address and fix legal errors. The Court instructed a district judge to, as Fox News reported, “treat the case as dismissed ‘without prejudice,’ allowing Trump to refile the case.”
🚨 BREAKING: President Donald Trump just scored a legal win in his lawsuit against Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register.
— Iowa Pulse (@IowaPulse) October 25, 2025
A federal appeals court ruled the case will move back to Iowa State Court, after Trump accused the defendants of “brazen election…
Commenting to Fox on the ruling, an unidentified spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said that the case has “focused on the fake election interfering polls conducted and denominated by J. Ann Selzer, The Des Moines Register and its corporate owner Gannett.”
The initial lawsuit was filed in Polk County, Iowa in December of last year. It alleged that the poll in question was not simply a mistake or an error in prediction, but rather, the poll attempted to “create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris in the final week of the 2024 Presidential Election."
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