President-elect Donald Trump filed a lawsuit Monday night against the Des Moines Register newspaper and its highly respected former pollster, adding to his ongoing legal attacks against news media companies.

The suit – which names the newspaper’s parent company, Gannett, its former pollster J. Ann Selzer and her polling firm – centers on a Selzer poll released three days before the presidential election that showed Trump trailing Vice President Kamala Harris.

The poll, released by what has been considered one of the nation’s most respected polling firms, caused a national stir and buoyed some Democrats’ hopes, as it showed Harris leading Trump in the red state by three percentage points, and had margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points. Trump ended up winning Iowa by about 13 points.

Trump’s attorneys filed the suit in Polk County, Iowa, where Des Moines is located, just days after ABC News settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump, agreeing to pay $15 million.

This new complaint, however, does not hinge on a defamation claim, but rather what the suit calls a violation of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act. It alleges that Selzer’s poll amounted to “election interference,” arguing that the newspaper and pollster “hoped that the … [poll] would create a false narrative of inevitability for Harris” in the last week of the campaign.

Selzer said Tuesday morning that she had not seen the lawsuit and had no comment.

Lark-Marie Antón, a Gannett spokeswoman, said in a statement that while the poll’s findings differed from the election results, the newspaper stands by its reporting.

“We have acknowledged that the Selzer/Des Moines Register pre-election poll did not reflect the ultimate margin of President Trump’s Election Day victory in Iowa by releasing the poll’s full demographics, cross tabs, weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from pollster Ann Selzer,” Anton said in a statement. “We stand by our reporting on the matter and believe a lawsuit would be without merit.”

Selzer, who announced after the election that she would be stepping away from election polling, has written that she analyzed the poll findings after the election and found nothing in the data to “illuminate the miss.”

A spokeswoman for Trump’s transition team did not immediately return a request for comment.

Some legal experts doubted that this latest suit brought by Trump would be successful.

“You would have to prove that a false statement was made and that the statement was made with people intending to rely on it,” said Rick Hasen, a professor of law at UCLA. “If someone is accurately reporting the results of a poll, that wouldn’t be a false statement. The poll might have errors in it, but that wouldn’t be a false statement.”

He added that the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act protects consumers from being misled in relation to the sale of merchandise and that the Trump complaint does “somersaults” to try to fit this conduct under the statute.

Trump has long derided the news media, calling reporters “the enemy of the people” since his first successful run for president. He has also pursued legal action against reporters and media companies. Last month, his campaign filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against The Washington Post, alleging the newspaper company made an illegal in-kind contribution to Harris’s campaign. That complaint cites a story in Semafor that reported, citing an unnamed source, that The Post purchased advertising to amplify stories critical of Trump.

A Post spokesperson at the time dismissed the allegations as “without merit,” adding, “As part of The Washington Post’s regular social media marketing strategy, promoted posts across social media platforms reflect high-performing content across all verticals and subjects.”

Trump also sued CBS News in October over a “60 Minutes” interview with Harris, saying its edit of the sit-down amounted to election interference. And he has a pending libel lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize board over a statement the board made when it reaffirmed its decision to award prizes to the New York Times and The Post in 2018 for coverage of Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.

His recently settled suit against ABC News stemmed from a televised interview in which anchor George Stephanopoulos said Trump was found “liable for rape” when a jury had found him liable for sexual abuse in the case of E. Jean Carroll, who said Trump raped her in a department store in the mid-1990s. In 2023, the jury awarded Carroll $5 million for battery and defamation. Early this year, Carroll was awarded an additional $83.3 million in damages for defamatory statements Trump made that disparaged her and denied her rape allegations.

While legal observers were split over the merit of Trump’s defamation lawsuit against ABC News, the settlement raised concerns that he might feel more emboldened to legally go after media outlets for coverage he dislikes.

“It’s not at all clear to me who would have won [the ABC News defamation] case had it gone to trial, but it was not a frivolous claim,” Hasen said. “It was a claim that was within the realm of reality, whereas this Des Moines Register case does not seem [to be].”