Hiltzik: Rasmussen Reports promotes vaccine resistance

Rasmussen Reports used to be a fairly reputable and credible political polling organization, good enough to be included among the pollsters that services like FiveThirtyEight relied on to give a broad-spectrum measure of voter sentiment in the run-up to the elections. state and federal elections.

It is true that Rasmussen had a pro-Republican “house effect” detectable in the language of the polls, but that it was consistent enough to offset it in the averages of the published polls.

But something has happened to Rasmussen in recent years. Not only have their results become more starkly partisan, favoring Republican and conservative politicians, but they have also increasingly promoted right-wing conspiracy theories about issues such as race relations, election results, and, perhaps most worrying, the vaccines and the origins of COVID.

Earlier this month, Rasmussen tweeted the results of surveys he conducted in June 2023 and last month, claiming to find that 1 in 5 Americans believe they know someone who died from the COVID vaccine.

There are many reasons to ignore any such survey that asks people what they think about a scientifically validated fact; in this case, that the records overwhelmingly show that the COVID vaccines widely used in the United States are safe and effective.

But Rasmussen has doubled down on his findings. In a series of tweets on June 9, he first stated: “If the numbers implied by our COVID surveys are correct, vaccines killed more people around the world than Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.”

He later tweeted: “China lied. Fauci lied. “People died.” And he followed up with: “The government takeover of medicine was as deadly as always predicted.”

In other words, Rassmussen has gone from being a quantifier of public opinion to a participant in the spread of harmful propaganda. He still attempts to validate his results by claiming they are “relevant, timely and accurate,” citing his “track record.”

But from that history he has been getting gray hairs. The most recent election poll cited by the website documenting his record is from 2010.

More recently, 538, now owned by ABC News, removed Rasmussen from its polling averages in March. ABC took that step after Rasmussen failed to adequately respond to a questionnaire submitted by 538 asking Rasmussen to explain his survey methodology. Rasmussen posted ABC's inquiry on his website under the headline “ABC News: 'Answer our questions, or else!'”

I asked Rasmussen Reports by phone and email for comment on their tweet and survey, but received no response.

Rasmussen's turn towards the extreme right has been noticeable for several years. Founded in 2003 by pollster Scott Rasmussen, the company's forecasts received high marks for their 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 in the that Obama won.

As my colleague James Rainey later observed, the conservative media had used Rasmussen's polls “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, private equity firm Noson Lawen Partners.

In recent years, the company has resembled a paid pollster appealing to conservative organizations and authors. During the Trump administration, she became known for “a social media presence that embraced false claims that spread widely on the right,” the Washington Post's Philip Bump observed in March.

The company's treatment of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election, in which Democrat Katie Hobbs defeated Republican Kari Lake, is a case in point. In March 2023, Rasmussen reported the results of a poll he had conducted four months after the election and reportedly found (according to a headline on his website) that “most Arizona voters believe election 'irregularities' affected the result”.

According to Rasmussen, 51% of Arizona voters chose Lake and only 43% voted for Hobbs. The survey placed voter turnout at 92%; in reality it was 62.6%.

On Steve Bannon's War Room podcast, Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen's top pollster, said his results showed that “people in Arizona, by and large, think there was cheating.” That baseless claim, of course, is the core of the long and fruitless campaign by Lake, who gleefully cited the Rasmussen results to overturn the election.

Rasmussen's polls on COVID vaccines and other similar topics are not entirely useless. They may not tell us anything useful about scientific research or election results, but they do offer a window into how propaganda and nonsense have penetrated deeply into our political discourse, at least within the feverish morass of the right.

That brings us back to your survey about COVID and COVID vaccines. Rasmussen's methodology seems to include phrasing his questions as if they were stating a fact, however dubious. For his May 2024 survey of 1,250 American adults, for example, he asked, “Do you personally know anyone who has died from side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine?” Rasmussen reported that 19% responded affirmatively; The survey had a margin of error of 3%.

These questions have obvious flaws. The most important is that most respondents have no way of knowing whether the death of someone they know was related to the vaccine; Rasmussen, who conducts his surveys using robot calls, also has no way of authenticating the respondent's response.

Blaming COVID vaccines for a tide of undocumented injuries and deaths is a popular topic in the anti-vaccine community.

For them it has the virtue of being suggestive and unverifiable; Given that nearly 700 million doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been administered in the U.S. alone, the law of large numbers means that “just by chance… there will be a large number of people who will die in, say, 30 days”. to be vaccinated even if the vaccine has absolutely nothing to do with their deaths,” in the words of veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski.

It is not unusual for the death or illness of a prominent entertainer or athlete to spark swarms of anti-vaxxers claiming that the victim must have been recently vaccinated. Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, whom I previously identified as “America's most dangerous charlatan” and a “card-carrying member of the anti-vaccine mafia,” misrepresented published research to claim that the COVID vaccine posed a high threat of Heart problems. for young men.

The investigation said no such thing; Rather, he said the risk of cardiac death from the vaccines was statistically nonexistent and, in fact, lower than the risk of cardiac death resulting from contracting COVID-19 itself.

Despite all this, there are countless speculations by non-specialists that the illness or death of acquaintances can be attributed to vaccines. One promoter of the idea, Michigan State University economist Mark Skidmore, even concluded, from an anonymous database of 2,840 respondents compiled by an independent polling firm, that the number of respondents who said knowing someone who had died from the vaccine meant that the number of deaths from the vaccine in the United States “may reach 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 his vaccine nonsense is filled with weasel talk, as if the company is opting for plausible deniability.

In his tweet claiming that “If the numbers implied by our COVID surveys are correct, vaccines killed more people around the world than Jews were murdered in the Holocaust,” for example, the word “if” carries a lot of baggage, Not that his invocation of The Holocaust is defensible under the circumstances.

Similarly, his tweet, “China lied. Fauci lied. People died” refers to a question in his June 23 COVID survey, in which he asks respondents to agree or disagree with that phrase. (This is known as “JAQing,” for “just asking questions.”)

As for her tweet saying, “The government takeover of medicine was as deadly as always predicted,” it comes as a comment on a tweet from 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 murderers in history; “That's what got me off the air at Fox. It was true then and it's true now.”

Let's leave aside that the United States government has not carried out a “medicine takeover,” much less that government action on health care has been “deadly.”

Make no mistake: Rasmussen is responsible for these tweets and deserves the blame for helping fuel a massive vaccine hoax that may have cost vaccine resisters their lives. If he ever had a reputation for reliability, he no longer has it.