Lakshya Jain: A Shameless Hack
In a just world, his consistent molesting of data to justify harming the marginalized would trigger mandatory retirement.
Lakshya Jain posted an article on “The Argument” substack claiming Americans have moved in a distinctly anti-trans-rights direction, in recent years. There are many problems with this analysis - I firmly believe Lakshya has unconscionably molested this data - and I will make my case for that here. I’m not going to go through Lakshya’s analysis on each of the poll response numbers, because I think fundamental issues of methodology make this poll utter bullshit; If you want, feel free to glance through Lakshya’s article linked above… However, it is absolutely not required to understand the issues I lay out, below.
Are you polling, or are you trolling?!
In an article last September called: “How our surveys work”, Lakshya explained the methodology he uses for every poll The Argument conducts. Most of it is standard, but one thing sticks out as extremely odd:
“The portion of people who actually voted in 2024 was weighted to the real election results. The portion of nonvoters was kept fixed from the raw sample.”
This “How our surveys work” article makes it clear that Lakshya’s polls are selecting X number of 2024 Trump voters, Y number of 2024 Harris voters, and Z number of people who did not vote as the "representative sample” for every poll in the same proportion as the results of the 2024 election! That means the data is being intentionally skewed with more people who voted Trump in 2024 than anything else… Which is obviously not going to match the current-day electorate, and permanently bias all poll results towards whatever opinion those 2024 Trump voters hold!
Here’s what it looks like in the little explainer blurb Lakshya added in his most recent article “The trans rights backlash is real”:
As you can see, more Trump 2024 voters are represented than Harris voters. This is the case for every single poll The Argument has ran thus far, including one just released one and a half years after the 2024 election. How could this possibly make sense?!
If you don’t want to take my word for it, take a look at this article from the polling group North Star Opinion Research on why the skewing Lakshya is using - sometimes called “Recalled Ballot Weighting” - often makes no sense, and they refuse to use it. You’ll notice many of their reasons being similar to mine, although I think none of the cases they cite are quite as absurd as what Lakshya is currently doing.
Also - why use “Registered Voters” at all?!
It’s a silly choice to restrict this poll to registered voters, in the first place. Voter registrations close to election day sharply uptick, so it makes more sense to capture likely voters if you care at all about the opinions of people who will be registering soon for the first time (due to age, motivation, or otherwise). This registered vs likely voter issue is a real issue, however, I consider it much less of an issue than the blatant skewing I outlined, above, and overall I have far less of an issue with not using Likely Voters compared to my final problem with the article…
Releasing this NOW is morally fucked up!
In addition to the above statistical malpractice, the timing of this article is incredibly suspect, considering Jesse Van Rootselaar shot up a school in Canada last week, and Roberta Esposito - a far-right neo-nazi fan of Marjorie Taylor-Greene shot up a youth hockey game just yesterday.
Those of us who follow transgender issues closely understand transgender individuals commit far fewer mass shootings than non-transgender people…
Both of these shooters were self-identified as transgender, and Jain was quick to join the chorus of right-wing media voices lending support to dehumanizing and punishing legal restrictions on transgender people with his article. Those of us who follow transgender issues closely understand transgender individuals commit far fewer mass shootings than non-transgender people: according to the US Census, 1% of people in the US are transgender, however, according to statistics gathered by the Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University on 201 recent mass shootings:
“…[C]isgender males committed 97.5 percent of mass shootings between 1996 and 2024, while cisgender women made up 2.03 percent of cases in the U.S.”
If we add up the 97.5% for non-transgender males and the 2% for non-transgender females we get this striking fact:
99.5% of mass shootings are committed by non-transgender people, and transgender people committed mass shootings at half the rate of everyone else.
…the second part (“half the rate”) comes from transgender people being 1% of the population but only committing 0.5% of the mass shootings.
The US Nonprofit “Gun Violence Archive”, which did a much larger study tracking 5700 USA mass shootings from 2013 to 2025 cited a number far less to Newsweek, recently:
Oh Brother! This guy stinks!
A pundit who is considered a leading source of analysis on polling posting anything with the glaring issues cited above is unconscionable. Doing it under a headline that says: “The trans rights backlash is real”, and basically advocating real harm against the transgender minority that authoritarians in and around the White House have already declared intent to harm, knowing it’s likely they will use your words to justify said harm? In a just world, that would be career-ending.
Posting it *just one day* after an extremely MAGA neo-nazi does a mass shooting at a hockey game, while American right-wing media is still rushing to blame the shooter’s transgender identity for the violence - instead of the MAGA and neo-nazi parts of that same person’s identity?
Only the most shameless hacks can stoop to that level. Sadly, that’s the muck Mr Jain is currently wallowing in.
I used to respect Lakshya but honestly yeah I have come to see him as extremely bad faith.