Business
Column: This GOP-leaning political polling firm has turned into a purveyor of anti-vaccine propaganda
Rasmussen Reports used to be a fairly creditable and credible political polling organization, good enough to be included among the pollsters relied on by services such as FiveThirtyEight to give a broad-spectrum gauge of voter sentiment in the run-up to state and federal elections.
It’s true that Rasmussen had a detectable pro-Republican “house effect,” in polling parlance — but one that was consistent enough to compensate for in published polling averages.
But something has happened to Rasmussen in recent years. Not only have its results become more sharply partisan, favoring Republican and conservative politicians, but it also has increasingly promoted right-wing conspiracy theories on topics such as race relations, election results and — perhaps most troubling — COVID vaccines and COVID origins.
By random chance alone…there will be a large number of people who die within, say, 30 days of being vaccinated even if the vaccine has absolutely nothing to do with their deaths.
— Pseudoscience debunker David Gorski, MD
Earlier this month, Rasmussen tweeted the results of polls it conducted in June 2023 and last month, claiming to find that 1 in 5 Americans believe they know someone who died from a COVID vaccine.
There are many reasons to disregard any such poll asking people what they think about a scientifically validated fact — in this case, that the record shows overwhelmingly that the COVID vaccines widely used in the U.S. are safe and effective.
But Rasmussen has doubled down on its findings. In a series of tweets on June 9, it declared, first: “If the numbers implied by our COVID polling are correct, the vaccines killed more people worldwide than Jews killed in the Holocaust.”
Then it tweeted: “China lied. Fauci lied. People died.” And followed that with: “The government take over of medicine was as deadly as always predicted.”
In other words, Rassmussen has morphed from a quantifier of public opinion into a participant in the spread of noxious propaganda. It still tries to validate its results by claiming that they’re “relevant, timely and accurate,” citing its “track record.”
But that track record has been sprouting gray hairs. The most recent election polling cited by the web page documenting its track record is from 2010.
More recently, 538, now owned by ABC News, dropped Rasmussen from its polling averages in March. ABC took that step after Rasmussen failed to respond suitably to a questionnaire 538 submitted asking Rasmussen to explicate its polling methodology. Rasmussen published ABC’s query on its website under the headline, “ABC News: ‘Answer Our Questions — Or Else!’”
I asked Rasmussen Reports by phone and email to comment on its tweet and its polling, but received no response.
Rasmussen’s veer to the far right has been noticeable for several years. Founded in 2003 by pollster Scott Rasmussen, the firm’s forecasts received high marks for accuracy in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. But it fell short in 2012, predicting victories for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama in several states that Obama won.
As my colleague James Rainey observed in the aftermath, the Rasmussen polls had been used by conservative media outlets “to prop up a narrative in the final days of the campaign that Romney had momentum and a good chance of winning the White House.”
In 2013, Scott Rasmussen left the firm due to unspecified business disagreements with its owner, the private equity firm Noson Lawen Partners.
In recent years, the firm has resembled a pollster-for-hire appealing to conservative organizations and authors. During the Trump administration, it became known for “a social media presence that embraced false claims that spread widely on the right,” Philip Bump of the Washington Post observed in March.
The firm’s treatment of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election, in which Democrat Katie Hobbs defeated Republican Kari Lake, is a good example. In March 2023, Rasmussen reported the results of a poll it had conducted four months after the election, purportedly finding (according to a headline on its website) that “most Arizona voters believe election ‘irregularities’ affected outcome.”
According to Rasmussen, 51% of Arizona voters chose Lake and only 43% voted for Hobbs. The poll placed the election turnout at 92%; actually it was 62.6%.
On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen’s lead pollster, said its results showed that “people in Arizona, by and large, think that cheating happened.” That unsupported assertion, of course, is the core of the long, fruitless campaign to overturn the election by Lake — who gleefully cited the Rasmussen results.
Rasmussen polls on COVID vaccines and other such topics aren’t entirely worthless. They may not tell us anything useful about scientific research or electoral results, but they do offer a window into how propaganda and claptrap have penetrated deeply into our political discourse, at least within the right-wing fever swamp.
That brings us back to its polling on COVID and COVID vaccines. Rasmussen’s methodology seems to include wording its questions as if they are stating a fact, no matter how dubious. For its May 2024 poll of 1,250 American adults, for instance, it asked, “Do you know someone personally who died from side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine?” Rasmussen reported that 19% replied in the affirmative; the poll had a margin of error of 3%.
Such questions have obvious flaws. The most important is that most respondents have no way of knowing whether an acquaintance’s death was related to the vaccine; nor does Rasmussen, which conducts its polls with robot calls, have any way of authenticating the respondent’s answer.
Blaming the COVID vaccines for a tide of undocumented injuries and deaths is a popular theme in the anti-vaccine community.
For them, it has the virtue of being suggestive and unverifiable; with nearly 700 million doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines having been administered in the U.S. alone, the law of large numbers implies that “by random chance alone … there will be a large number of people who die within, say, 30 days of being vaccinated even if the vaccine has absolutely nothing to do with their deaths,” in the words of veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski.
It’s not unusual for the death or illness of a prominent entertainer or athlete to provoke swarms of anti-vaxxers to assert that the victim must have been recently vaccinated. Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who I earlier identified as “the most dangerous quack in America” and a “card-carrying member of the anti-vaccine mafia,” misrepresented published research to claim that the COVID vaccine presented an elevated threat of cardiac problems for young men.
The research said no such thing; on the contrary, it said that the risk of cardiac death from the vaccines was statistically nonexistent and, indeed, lower than the risk of cardiac death resulting from catching COVID-19 itself.
Despite all that, conjectures by laypersons that the illness or death of acquaintances can be traced to the vaccines are legion. One promoter of the idea, economist Mark Skidmore of Michigan State University, even concluded from an anonymous database of 2,840 respondents compiled by a third-party survey firm that the number of respondents who said they knew someone who had died from the vaccine meant that the number of deaths from the vaccine in the U.S. “may be as high as 278,000.”
Skidmore’s paper citing that statistic was retracted last year by the peer-reviewed journal that had published it.
Rasmussen’s promotion of its vaccine-related balderdash is replete with weasel words, as if the firm is opting for plausible deniability.
In its tweet stating that “If the numbers implied by our COVID polling are correct, the vaccines killed more people worldwide than Jews killed in the Holocaust,” for instance, the word “if” carries a lot of baggage — not that its invocation of the Holocaust is defensible under the circumstances.
Similarly, its tweet, “China lied. Fauci lied. People died” refers to a question on its June 23 poll about COVID, in which it asks respondents to agree or disagree with that phrase. (This is known as “JAQing,” for “just asking questions.”)
As for its tweet stating, “The government take over of medicine was as deadly as always predicted,” that’s cast as a comment on a tweet by the former CBS and Fox reporter-turned-conspiracy-monger Lara Logan. She had written, “Pointing out how [Anthony] Fauci was seen by many as one of the worst mass killers in history — is what got me taken off the air at Fox. It was true then — and it is true now.”
Leave aside that the U.S. government has not staged a “take over of medicine,” much less that government action in healthcare has been “deadly.”
Make no mistake: Rasmussen is responsible for these tweets, and deserves blame helping to foment a mass delusion about the vaccines that may have cost the lives of vaccine resisters. If it ever had a reputation for trustworthiness, it doesn’t have it any longer.
Robotaxis could be turning into robocops.
A self-driving Waymo reported two teens to San Mateo, Calif., police on Monday after they were found drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns in the back of the vehicle.
According to a social media post from the San Mateo Police Department, officers detained two 15-year-olds after the Waymo they were riding in contacted the department and stopped in a parking lot until law enforcement arrived.
“Parents do you know where your teens are?” the San Mateo Police Department wrote on Facebook following the incident. “Waymo does!”
Officers removed both teens from the vehicle and determined they were using toy guns to shoot Orbeez out the windows. Orbeez are small, water-absorbing beads sold at toy stores.
“Toy guns, water guns, and BB guns all pose real dangers, especially to an untrained eye,” the Police Department said. “The simple handling of them can cause fear in [passersby].” “
A video posted on Facebook shows at least five officers and a police dog responding to the scene and approaching the Waymo with their weapons raised.
Waymo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Waymo vehicles have internal cameras and microphones that may be used in an emergency or to “promote safety and security,” according to Waymo’s online support page.
The cameras are also used to ensure the vehicles are clean and to help find lost items, according to the support page.
The company said it does not use facial recognition or other biometric identification technologies to identify individuals.
“In more urgent circumstances, support may access live video during a trip,” the Waymo page said.
The San Mateo Police Department’s Facebook post has garnered nearly 60 comments, with one user accusing Waymo of “snitching.”
“At least they got a designated driver?!” one user commented.
Business
Commentary: How right-wing anti-transgender attacks led to a Supreme Court ruling upholding sex discrimination
At the Supreme Court, the unfounded fear of boys masquerading as girls in youth sports rolled the clock back on gender equality.
On the surface, the Supreme Court’s June 30 opinion upholding state laws barring transgender girls from women’s and girl’s sports teams looks like a victory for women’s rights.
The 6-3 opinion by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh certainly presents itself that way. “Females and males have inherent physical differences relevant to athletic performance,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Therefore, in contact sports, forcing female athletes to compete against males can create significant safety risks.” He also asserted that “forcing female athletes to compete against males can undermine competitive fairness.”
The ruling applied to prohibitions enacted in Idaho and West Virginia against “biological” males’ participation on women’s teams in public schools. Federal judges in both states overturned the bans. The Supreme Court majority restored them. The ruling essentially upholds similar bans enacted in 25 other states.
There was no record of any transgender person participating in school sports in the State, let alone any ‘problem’ with transgender students … creating unfair competition or unsafe conditions.
— Justice Sonia Sotomayor, demolishing the Supreme Court’s argument in favor of banning transgender girls from girl’s sports
Kavanaugh, like Donald Trump and others in the anti-transgender camp, maintained that one’s gender is an immutable fact of life, established even before birth.
Anything else, Trump stated in an executive order he issued on inauguration day 2025, could only be the product of “gender ideology extremism.” The U.S., his order stated, recognizes “two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” That’s a “biological truth,” he declared.
In his own version of this overconfident and factually insupportable conclusion, Kavanaugh wrote: “As all agree, females and males have inherent physical differences relevant to athletic performance.”
Science recognizes that some people are “born with sex traits that don’t fit into typical male or female patterns,” to cite a discussion on the Cleveland Clinic web page on the topic “intersex.” The condition “may involve chromosomes, hormones, reproductive organs or genitals.”
From a psychological standpoint, medical science recognizes “gender dysphoria” as a real condition often requiring counseling and medical intervention such as the use of puberty blockers and hormones to stave off the development of secondary sex characteristics until the condition can be resolved.
No one disputes that there are physical differences between the sexes. Few would dispute that on average or even at the median, males may be bigger and more powerful than females, or that in certain contact sports the difference may be telling and on occasion dangerous.
But that’s not the same as asserting that the physical differences between males and females invariably mean that men will invariably prevail over women in all competitions or that their participation will endanger women.
The International Olympic Committee — in a policy statement Kavanaugh cited incompletely — says that in “most running and swimming events,” males have a 10% to 12% advantage over women. That’s a range that would accommodate the full spectrum of outcomes — transgender females win, cisfemales win, they tie. (The “cis” prefix denotes those living consistent with their birth gender.)
West Virginia and Idaho addressed this ambiguity by banning transgender women from all girls’ teams. So under their rules transgender girls can’t play football or soccer with cisgirls. But what’s the argument in favor of banning them from the 100-yard dash, or cross-country track, or diving, or archery?
But something else is going on here. The Supreme Court’s ruling was almost preordained, given the years-long campaign by conservatives to demonize transgender individuals as if they’re members of an alien species.
It will be recalled that during his presidential campaign, Trump spun a despicable fantasy in which children were kidnapped in school and secretly subjected to sex-change operations.
Trump’s executive order wiped out policies aimed at protecting transgender adults from discrimination. He moved to outlaw gender-affirming medical therapies for anyone under 19 by cutting off federal funding for healthcare institutions that provide such care.
He banned transgender individuals from serving in the military and ordered federal prison officials to move transgender inmates into the general populations consistent with their birth genders, which exposes them to physical assault. (Federal Judge Royce Lamberth of Washington, D.C., has blocked the government from transferring three transgender women into the male prison population or terminating their hormone treatments.)
I wrote during Trump’s first term, when his anti-transgender policies were still gestating, that the goal was to show that “one can target any community, as long as it doesn’t have a strong political voice or political power. These are the actions of bullies and cowards, pretending to be strong.”
Last year, the Supreme Court struck its first blow against transgender rights by upholding a Tennessee law banning transgender care, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, for minors. Similar laws have been enacted in 25 other states. The majority in that ruling by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was identical to the one in the June 30 ruling — Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.
Who are the targets of this ideological campaign? They number only about 1.6 million U.S. adults, or one-half of 1% of the U.S. population. About 300,000 adolescents ages 13 to 17, or 1.4%, identify as transgender, according to a study by UCLA School of Law.
In West Virginia, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed in her dissenting opinion, “there was no record of any transgender person participating in school sports in the State, let along any ‘problem’ with transgender students … creating unfair competition or unsafe conditions.”
In endorsing the flat bans directed at transgender women in Idaho and West Virginia, Kavanaugh argued that any attempt to implement case-by-case judgments of students’ requests to join sports teams inconsistent with their biological gender would create “an enormous practical and administrability problem.”
Is that so? That wasn’t the case in Maine, where the annual K-12 population is more than 170,000. There, a committee was charged with determining whether a student’s participation in a sport consistent with their gender identity but inconsistent with their biological sex would “result in an unfair athletic advantage” or present a risk of injury to others. The committee held 56 hearings from 2013 through 2021, or an average of seven per year. During the entire time span, only four involved transgender girls. (The outcome of those hearings couldn’t be learned.)
It was Maine’s policy, one might recall, that provoked a confrontation between Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills at the White House last year, when Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from the state unless it barred transgender students from competing on women’s sports teams. “We’ll see you in court,” Mills snapped.
Whether the Idaho and West Virginia laws genuinely protect girls from unfair competition is questionable. (The Idaho law is styled the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.”) In practice, the laws may subject women in public schools to “invasive sex verification procedures,” as educational expert George Theoharis of Syracuse University wrote after the court ruling.
They’re also based on a retrograde view of women as fragile creatures needing men’s protection, Theoharis wrote — “the same logic that has historically been used to justify excluding women from making their own healthcare decisions and girls from rigorous math and science; that physically demanding work is simply beyond them.” (There don’t appear to be any state laws barring transgender women from competing in men’s sports.)
Becky Pepper-Jackson, the plaintiff in the West Virginia case, in which she is identified only as B.P.J., is the only transgender girl who sought to join girl’s teams — track and cross-country — in the state. That was in 2021, just after West Virginia passed its law and she was about to enter sixth grade. She didn’t appear to pose any competitive risk to others on the track and cross-country teams she applied to join — her lawyers told the Supreme Court that on those no-cut teams, she “came in near the back.”
Anyway, she had not gone through male puberty, which theoretically might have endowed her with a competitive advantage, because she had been taking puberty blockers and female hormones.
Thanks to the court’s ruling, Sotomayor observed in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, West Virginia can deny Becky access to school sports “because it thinks they have an inherent athletic advantage, even if the facts show that they do not.”
B.P.J., Sotomayor wrote, “cannot practice on girls’ teams, even if she would not take anyone’s spot in an eventual competition, even if everyone who tries out for the team makes it, and even if having the chance to participate could aid immensely in treating B. P. J.’s gender dysphoria.”
So whose interest was really protected by the Supreme Court?
An Orange County real estate investor accused of criminally defrauding an Arizona bank of nearly $100 million pleaded not guilty Monday and remains in custody.
Mahender Makhijani, 44, of Corona del Mar — who also was ordered by an arbitrator to pay $1.34 billion in a separate civil fraud case — was arraigned in Santa Ana federal court on two charges.
He is accused of bank fraud and making a false statement to a bank in a June 8 case involving a $100 million real estate loan made by Phoenix-based Western Alliance Bank. He was taken into custody on June 10.
Makhijani is accused of providing bogus collateral for the October 2024 loan now in default. In a civil lawsuit, Western Alliance said the outstanding balance as nearly $99 million.
Prosecutors say he falsified title insurance policies that showed the bank would have a first lien on the underlying collateral if the loan went bad, when in fact it did not.
A trial was set for August 11 before U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in Santa Ana.
Michael Schachter, his criminal defense attorney, did not respond to messages seeking comment.
In the civil case, an arbitrator in May ordered Makhijani to pay Laguna Beach real estate mogul Mohammad Honarkar $1.34 billion after ruling he had fraudulently induced him into a 2021 joint venture — and then wrested control and lost to creditors more than two dozen properties Honarkar had owned.
Makhijani has not been criminally charged in that case, but prosecutors alleged in an affidavit in support of the bank fraud charges that he used “force and threats” in his dealings with Honarkar and others — including taking over the landmark Hotel Laguna in 2023 that Honarkar was renovating.
Prosecutors sought to hold Makhijani without bail after his arrest.
The affidavit noted he is a legal Indian immigrant with a home and bank accounts in that country, has access to private jets and threatened to “run away” if caught in a difficult situation.
The request was denied and he was granted $500,000 bail.
However, Makhijani remains in custody after a hearing sought by prosecutors last month before Magistrate Judge Autumn Spaeth.
The judge declined to accept a $450,000 cashier’s check submitted by a Makhijani associate for the bail, finding insufficient proof the source of the funds was legitimate, according to court records.
Makhijani is not prominent outside Orange County real estate circles, but he established a thriving distressed-assets business over the last decade that attracted prominent Southern California real estate investors.
Prosecutors said it paid for a lifestyle that included two multimillion-dollar homes in Corona del Mar, a luxury apartment in Newport Beach and various luxury vehicles.
As of last month, prosecutors had not fully traced his assets, which they believe are not held in his name and some of which may be in India.
The businessman employed an array of shell companies and strawmen to sign documents on his behalf, and to stand in for him as operators of his companies, according to the affidavit.
Makhijani told an associate he took extra precautions because wanted to insulate himself from litigation and that “they were sharks in the distressed world who took advantage of people,” the affidavit stated.
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