January 27, 2024 • 35 mins
As the President of RMG Research, Scott Rasmussen has been polling Americans for their opinions for more than 35 years. Newt talks with Scott about his recent briefing on the Elite 1% in America and their views on issues. This is the first-ever survey research defining the characteristics and beliefs of the Elite 1% who are the root cause of political dysfunction in America today.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
On this episode of Newsworld. My guest today is someone
who The Washington Post is called, quote a driving force
in American politics. I think of him as a personal friend,
somebody who is an entrepreneurial genius. As the president of
RMG Research, Scott Rasmussen has been polling Americans for their
opinions for more than thirty five years. He provides political
(00:27):
and business leaders with insights from his trademarked counter polling platform.
Through a Gold Circle membership program, members got a better
understanding of the public mood through access to Scott's data
and analysis, along with customized briefings. I recently received a
briefing from Scott on his research defining the quote elite
(00:48):
one percent. He did the research with the support of
the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. The results are so intriguing
that I asked him to share his findings with all
of us that I am really pleased to welcome my
guest to my friend, somebody I admire so deeply, Scott
wrestless On. Scott, welcome and thank you for joining me
(01:19):
on Newtsworld.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Well, it's great to be here, you know. I love
talking about this study and about just the world that
we live in. There's so much in politics where people
just kind of go with the flow. They say the
same things they've been saying for decades, and we live
in an ever changing world, so you have to keep
looking at it differently.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
When you go back to your early years, it will
do later on. There was no reason to believe you'd
become a sort of national polling guru. What drew you
into this fascination with public opinion?
Speaker 2 (01:51):
In nineteen eighty four, I sold the business and there
was that Reagan Mondale campaign. I was a little bit
disturbed with the lack of seria discussion on federal budget issues.
Wrote a book on the federal budget. Connie Mack, who
you knew well, wrote the forward to it, and that
got me into the political world. And I started noting
(02:12):
that the questions that were being asked by pollsters didn't
sound like anybody I ever talked to outside of DC.
So I did my very first poll back in the
late eighties. It was on social security, so few people
talked about it back then. At the Wall Street Journal
asked me to write something about it, and it just
took off from there, and I think it was a
(02:33):
different way of looking at the world. I was always
pretty good with numbers. What I think you may even
forget is how much the world has changed of polling.
Tip O'Neil, who was one of your predecessors as Speaker,
was Speaker for a very long time, and if you
look at the national databases, I'll bet there aren't a
dozen national polls on his job approval ratings or favorability ratings.
(02:57):
Now you have polls on the Speaker coming out just
about every day. But it was a different world back then.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
So you entered that world, and then you decided to
launch your first website in the year I remember very
fondly nineteen ninety four when we were doing the contract
with America. What led you to decide to create a website?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Well, because I was too stupid to really know what
the Internet was all about. It was the new thing.
Everybody was talking about it, and I had a media background,
so it did strike me that it was a media platform,
and I thought it was a place that I could
put some of my data and that would attract me
some clients. And what I didn't understand was really how
revolutionary the Internet was going to be. I was startled
(03:39):
by the attention that we got. I was startled by
the response to the online world, and ultimately Rush Limbaugh
would start talking about our work, or Fox News came
on the air and began talking about it. We were
the very first people who ever put polling data directly
to the consumers online, and that became a great success.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
It certainly made you a household name, at least among
the politically aware. You now produce both counterpolling and the
Gold Membership Program. Talk just briefly about that.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Well, counterpolling is something I've actually been doing forever. I
finally came up with a name for it. You know,
it's what I said earlier, the way I put it today.
Most pollsters ask questions in the language of a Georgetown
cocktail party, and again, most voters don't talk that way.
So I consciously look at the mainstream polls that come
out and I try to think, how would I translate
(04:32):
that so a normal person would understand it. When NPR
asks about gender affirming care, I've done research the show.
Nobody knows what that means. So if I ask about
puberty blockers and gender transition surgery, you get wildly different results.
Very few Americans really have an understanding of what woke means.
So if you ask a question about what it means,
(04:54):
what is you know woke or is it good or bad?
The results aren't very meaningful unless you translate a little bit.
So that's the counterpolling. And the Gold Circle membership, which
I'm very pleased to your organization, is one of our members.
It's a membership program that we give access to our
data and our insights, and we hold fun webinars like
we did recently on the Elite one percent.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Can people who are said join the Gold Membership program.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
They sure can, but it's a high dollar entry fee.
It's not a twenty nine to ninety five subscription.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
I have to say, the quality of the information you
provide is extraordinary. In frankly, when I go on Fox
News fairly often, between the program we run on America's
New Majority Project and the program you run, I feel
like I'm reasonably confident talking about the values of the
American people. I'm a big advocate of Lincoln's admonition that
(05:46):
with public sentiment, anything as possible, and without public centiment
nothing as possible. And I'm appalled at Washington's isolation from
public sentiment. I mean, there's a major reason why we
have the current political eruption that we have is that
this city has become a fortress of lobbyist interest groups
and bureaucracies against the rest of the country. It's kind
(06:09):
of amazing.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
I just want to jump in there on something. You know,
I was really fortunate as a high school student. My
best friend's father went to school with a guy named
Joanapolitan who was legendary. He polled on John F. Kennedy's campaign,
and Lyndon Johnson was the first person known as a
political consultant. He gave me an hour of his time
as a high school student to talk about the way
(06:31):
he saw the world, and one of the things that
he said was that you should never underestimate the intelligence
of the American people, but you should never overestimate their
level of political knowledge. And I believe official Washington these
days does the opposite. They underestimate their intelligence and they
overestimate how much they pay attention to politics.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Neapolitan wrote a book called The Election Game and How
to Win It, which I used as a bible for years.
I mean, the ninety four cam Pain was in part
designed based on Joseph Neapolitan's insights. It's very very so
I had no idea you had that relationship.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Yeah. I still am amazed the role that he had
in the world, that he gave me that time as
a kid who really didn't appreciate how special it was.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
I'm intrigued because you do so many polls and you
have such a depth of experience that the story we
were talking about earlier before we began this tape was
that you noticed an anomaly of only three or four
people out of a thousand person sample, and then you
began looking for it. Talk through how you came to
the elite one percent.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Well, the first thing, you know, I look at poles
all the time. We do a minimum of two national
surveys a week. I look at our data and other data,
and one of the things that first caught my eye
was there was a huge gap between the views of
postgraduate Americans and everybody else. There's a lot of talk
in the political world about the diploma divide those with
(07:57):
and without a college degree, but in act, the gap
between those with a postgraduate degree and a bachelor's degree
is often bigger than the gap between those with a
bachelor's degree and no degree, so I began looking at that.
I also noticed that people who lived in very heavily
densely populated urban areas more than ten thousand people per
(08:19):
square mile, were also way out of touch with the
American people, and not surprisingly, upper income people were as well.
I had a theory that if you combined all three
of these you might find something unique. And the logic
of it was, if you get a postgraduate degree and
go to live in Manhattan or Washington, you might have
different attitudes than if you have a postgraduate degree and
(08:42):
go to live in Cedar Rapids or McKinney, Texas or something.
There's only about eight or ten people in our normal
samples that have all three of those attributes. So I
combined about twenty five surveys, got a sample of a
few hundred people in the elite world, and I was stunned.
The entire population and all those surveys, Joe Biden's job
(09:04):
approval rating was forty one percent. Among the elite group,
it was eighty two percent. So even with a small sample,
I knew this was something worth pursuing. It's very expensive
to pull these people. I did a couple of pilot
studies just to see if I was onto something. And
then fortunately the Committee to Unleashed Prosperity was interested, and
(09:27):
we did two surveys of this elite one percent and
the results, I don't know whether to describe them as
fascinating or terrifying or a little of both.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
It is terrifying. You begin to realize how deep the
cultural divide is. And these are the people who run
the universities, run the news media, run much of the government,
serve as judges and prosecutors. I mean, it is the
power center of the United States, and they are totally
different from the rest of us.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
That's right. The first thing we did every question that
we asked when we surveyed this elite one percent group,
we did a companion survey of one thousand voters just
to see where the gaps were. The first question that
caught my attention was among the elite one percent, forty
seven percent believe there is too much individual freedom in America.
(10:18):
Among most voters, fifty seven percent say there's not enough freedom.
So we were having wildly different views. And we also
then noticed there were a couple of key subgroups. One
that's not a surprise given the current news cycle. There
were people who went to about a dozen elite universities.
They make up about half of this elite world, and
(10:41):
their views were even further out of touch with the
American people and the other subgroup where there's people who
talk politics every day. So if you can picture the
elite one percent, some of them are out doing business
or doing other things. Some of them are obsessed with politics.
And among that politically obsessed group, sixty nine percent say
(11:01):
there is too much individual freedom in America. It's hard
to imagine that, but that is the view of the people.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
When the elite one percent tell you that there's too
much freedom in America? What do you think they mean
by that?
Speaker 2 (11:16):
First of all, I know what they answered. The question
they answered was we asked, very straightforward, is there too
much individual freedom, too much government control? Or is the
balance about right. We know that voters and the elite
one percent gave wildly different answers, and it's kind of
a mind boggling stat What I think they mean is
(11:36):
a little bit of we need to restore order in
the country. We need rules for everybody to play by.
The elites know what the rules are, and we're frustrated
that the American people aren't following. They were frustrated that
a lot of people didn't want to follow advice during
the pandemic. They're frustrated when parents go to complain to
(12:00):
their school boards. I think that's where the elites see
that is a real threat.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
These are the people who would force you to buy
an electric car, and would force you to give up
your gas stove, and would feel that you were being
selfish if you didn't do what you were told.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Well, and actually they're probably disappointed that you don't thank
them for it, because they're busy saving the world on
your behalf. You know. Sometimes I say that their view
is they don't want government of buying for the people.
They want government of and buy the elites, and they
think it's good for the people. I mean, that's sort
of the mindset here.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
So you described a dirty dozen of league universities. Can
you describe that detriment? Because I thought it was fascinating.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Yeah, so the dirty universities. I didn't come up with
the list. Actually, there were some academic research done back
in the Obama years and it's been updated ever since.
And if you look at the politically influential elites, or
if you look at the corporate board elites, or if
you were to go to the philanthropic world and the
(13:19):
charitable world, about half of the people that are dominating
those institutions went to one of twelve schools, either graduate
or undergraduate. Most of them are the Ivy League, but
you've also got Stanford in Chicago and a few others
in there, and you know, these are schools that do
(13:40):
produce most of the leadership. In fact, just to give
you a sense of scale, before Amy Coney Barrett was
lifted up to the Supreme Court, the last justice who
did not go to one of these twelve elite schools
was Thirdgode Marshall in nineteen sixty seven. And that's a
vast change. In the forties and fifties, there was a
(14:01):
lot more diversity about where people came from. If you're dirty.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Dozen are Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, Cornell, MIT,
and the University of Chicago.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
And some of those have been in the news lately.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
In a sense, you know, maybe the advice the next
administration is, if they come from one of these, don't
appoint them.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
That would be a good start.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
I want to be very clear in this. I'm not
anti education or even anti elite or anti expert. We
need expertise, but it's got to be accountable. If I
have a cold and I go to the doctor, the
doctor has expertise that I don't have, but I make
the final decisions. And when we have a government, we
(14:51):
do need experts to handle a lot of tasks, but
there still needs to be accountability to the voters.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
I noticed you surveyed Harvard freshman class, and I was
actually startled by your numbers.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
First off, I didn't do that survey. Harvard did that.
Harvard Crimson released it. But the numbers are absolutely stunning. Again,
only six percent of the entering class at Harvard are Protestant.
Basically half are either agnostic or atheists. So if you
want to talk about values and faith, it doesn't look
anything like America.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
It's like eight to one agnostic or atheist over Protestant.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Right, and it's also about eight to one progressive over conservative.
And at a time when most Americans are saying we
don't want affirmative action to determine college admissions, these freshmen
overwhelmingly support it. You know what troubles me about this
is if our leadership funnel is being narrowed down to
(15:51):
these schools and their student body and their teachings are
so out of touch with America, that's problematic for our
system of government. You know, during the tea party era,
I spoke at Harvard and had a brown bag lunch
afterwards with some of the faculty members, and one of them,
she was very sincere and very frustrated, said why won't
(16:15):
the American people let us lead? That's what we were
trained to do. And my first comment was, they don't
like where you're leading. But the second point, it really
the big issue here is what an arrogant, entitled attitude
that reflects that the rest of us are too stupid
to play a part in the leadership of our nation.
And I think that's part of the problem.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
The Crimson survey point out that one point forty six
percent of the faculty think they're conservatives. One point forty
six percent. This is virtually insane. But there's a number
in here which I was very struck by that you
said was the most frightening number you'd seen in polling. Ironically,
(16:56):
it is the opposite of the message we're told over
and over by the establishment talk testament about the willingness
to steal elections.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
So this is one of those questions you put out
you're never quite sure what to expect. We asked a
thousand voters, what if your favorite candidate lost a close
election but their campaign team knew they could cheat and
get away with it. Would you rather have them cheat
and win or basically play fair and lose the election?
(17:25):
Only seven percent of voters said they wanted to cheat
and win, which, you know, I wish it was one percent,
but still seven percent means that the overwhelming majority of
Americans are still on board with fair elections. When we
asked the elite one percent that same question, thirty five
percent of them said they would rather cheat and win.
(17:46):
But what was really terrifying in that most terrifying result
I've ever seen the elite one percent who were talking
politics every day, that politically obsessed elite, sixty nine percent
of them would rather cheat than follow what the voters decided.
That's a win at all cost mentality, that's we know
(18:09):
best and we don't want voters to get in our
way mentality, And it speaks of the fact that they
trust the government and they don't trust the voters.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
I was very struck with how willing the elites are
to impose on us. You point out that seventy seven
percent of the elite one percent would impose strict restrictions
in rationing on the private use of gas, meat, and electricity.
If there was a straight up election with that as
the referendum issue, these people would be crushed by popular
(18:40):
will right absolutely.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
And you know, there are a lot of individual things
they would like to ban SUVs and gas powered vehicles.
Some of that can be attributed to the fact that
if you're in those urban areas, you don't try very much.
But I think a lot of it can be attributed
to the fact that the elites know the rules won't
apply to them. That is a factor in all of this.
(19:03):
And I think it's very easy to talk about these
issues without really thinking about how big that cultural divide is.
But when you've got a bunch of people who are
in power, who believe they should overturn elections, they should
do what they think is right, and that the American
people have too much individual freedom, what happens when they
(19:25):
leave their bubble and go home for the holidays and
talk to regular voters who don't share that view.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
I suspect they don't. They would be too painful. And
I notice, for example, one of the places it's rapidly
moving towards a real crescendo, seventy two percent of the
elite one percent would ban gas powered vehicles, and I
just saw a poll that said six percent of the
country wants to buy electric vehicles. Now, the idea that
the government's going to impose on ninety four percent of
(19:51):
the country has to be as anti democracy, an anti
popular government as anything I've ever seen.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Yes, And I think the good news in this is
that voters are pushing back, that there is a reluctance
to embrace all of this. It's a chilling mindset that
we have. One of the things we want to do
at our MG research with our continued focus on this,
is to shine a light on just how far out
of touch these people are, because it is just beyond comprehension.
(20:22):
It is something. By the way, you love history, probably
even more than I do. But Woodrow Wilson dreamed of
this scenario back in the nineteenth century. This was the
founding of the progressive movement was to have a specially
educated group of civil servants who would be insulated from
voters and do what's best for the country. So that's
what we're heading towards, and voters, fortunately are people.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
It always somehow involves the elite themselves not being affected.
I noticed that fifty five percent of the elite one
percent favor banning non essential air travel, which they would define.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Of course, on the.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Other hand, carry has to fly by private plane absolutely.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
And look, we see this all the time in all
kinds of survey results, that people like to impose rules
on others. That's just when you have to apply it
to yourself, it gets a little challenging.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Having been a congressman from Georgia, fifty three percent of
the elite one percent would ban private air conditioning. I mean,
you have to wonder what climate they live in. It
would be like banning heat in the Northeast exactly.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
We all get caught in our bubbles, and we all
have a circle of people. We begin to listen and
things begin to make sense, And all I can really
believe is that you know, in this world there are
so many people talking about climate change is going to
end humanity within twelve years unless we do something that
nothing seems extreme compared to that.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
One of the things I'm struck with that you really
bring to life is that the rise of the administrative state,
the power of the bureaucracy, has also been matched by
the rise of distrust of that very state by the
average person. So it's a real tension between we the
people and we the bureaucrats.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
You know, one of the things I mentioned in the
presentation on this there are three times as many government
regulators today as there were in nineteen seventy two, So
the administrative state has grown tremendously, and with things like
the Chevron decision, they were given evermore authority. Interestingly, from
that same time, from nineteen seventy two until now, a
(22:54):
majority of Americans have never trusted the federal government to
do the right thing most of the time. So you've
got this growth in the administrative state combined with a
declining trust in the government, and that creates not just
a tension between bureaucrats and voters, but it creates real
questions about the legitimacy of the government.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
You point out that eighty nine percent of the voters
still believe in America's founding ideas. That's a much bigger
number than I would have guessed after all these years
of brainwashing by the left.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Yeah, we have done a lot of research on this,
and even on things like so if you talk to
people who say they like socialism, who a lot of
Americans would instinctively say, Wow, they don't like America's founding ideals.
Turns out their definition of socialism isn't what some of
us older folks remember it to be. Most people who
(23:48):
say they like socialism define it ultimately as decision making
closer to home. They don't think of it as an
economic system. So the words change along the way. But
people have a very strong distrust of centralized power, and
the ideals of freedom, equality and self governance are really important.
(24:08):
We did a survey years back on hate speech. We
read a dozen really horrific statements, you know, about all
Mexicans coming into our country, our rapist type of things,
I mean, really bad stuff, and not single one of
those statements did most people think should be banned. They
thought they were atrocious, they thought they would run away
(24:29):
from anybody talking like that, but they didn't think they
should be banned. And the reason was they didn't trust
the government to make those decisions.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
What additional polling do you plan to do on the
lead one percent?
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Oh, we have great plans. We're looking for support for
it right now. But one of the things we're going
to do is a survey on what they believe that
voters think. We have some indications already that they actually
think voters don't disagree with them as much as they think.
The survey we did so so far was mostly regulatory
(25:01):
and finance and economic things. We want to get into
some cultural issues, whether it's guns or trans policies or
anything else. We want to begin to understand really who
they are and where they're coming from a better definition.
So we'll do a lot of research on that. And
then we also want to do some research on the
(25:22):
people who are managing the federal government today, what are
their views, and so that's going to be an ongoing
project as we begin to roll this out. I'll tell
you one thing that struck me very recently. We took
a look at our data in the month leading up
to October seventh, and then we compared it to the
(25:42):
same results in December, So a couple of months later,
after the horrific attack on Israel. Among most Americans, their
opinion of Joe Biden never changed, but among those with
a postgraduate degree it fell by eighteen points. I think
that's because they were more supportive of Hamas than the
(26:03):
rest of the country. It just speaks to how out
of touch they are, and that's why I want to
keep researching this group to learn more about them.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
If you do a similar pattern of senior bureaucrats, you
will really do the country a great service because I
have a hunch that they are, in their own unique way,
as arrogant and as willing to impose and as indifferent
to the American people as the elite one percent.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
I would probably guess, and I don't have any data
on this, so it's just a guess right now that
they seek the consent of the one percent rather than
the consent of the government.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
I think that's right. That's why I think this is
a brilliant study. Now I have to take just a
minute because your background is so astonishing and very few
people know about it. I mean, you grew up in
a very entrepreneurial environment. Can you talk about the early
days of entrepreneurship.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
It's funny when you put it like that, because I
can't remember any other days. My father was into broadcasting.
I did my first commercial, my first radio commercial when
I was seven years old. We got involved with the
New England Whalers and the World Hockey Association. I did
some announcing there. We always had side projects going on.
(27:15):
That was just the world we lived in. You couldn't
get the Whalers on TV. We kept looking for ways
to make that happen. And along the way, my father
and I learned about this crazy new thing called the
satellite and satellite transmission. And people don't understand how different
that was. In nineteen seventy eight. You know, there's only
(27:35):
one college football game on a week. College basketball had
a couple of national games a year. That was it.
Most sports teams weren't on. That was the environment we
were in. And to send a signal around the country
you had to go to AT and T and they
would just charge you by the mile. The satellite came along.
RCA put Satcom one into orbit. We could send a
(27:57):
signal around the US for less than a cost to
send the same signal around the state of Connecticut via
traditional landlines. And when we learned that we thought, Wow,
there's something big here, and we ended up creating a
little network called ESPN and it's done pretty well since then.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
That's wild. So it really started though around a particular
hockey team and how do you build an audience for
that hockey team?
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Right? And we were doing everything you could imagine to
try and get them on TV. We actually had a proposal.
We met with all the cable operators in Connecticut and said,
we're going to get the Whalers Yukon basketball and Bristol
Red Sox baseball and we're going to produce it for
you guys. And they laughed us out of the room,
but they did tell us about the satellite. And you
(28:44):
know when we found out about the satellite, Al Parnello
was the guy who was selling that for our CAAI
still keep in touch with him. He was telling us
how different the world was going to be, and we
knew there was something there. We couldn't put our finger
on it. And the day that we actually came up
up with the idea, it was August sixteenth, nineteen seventy eight,
my little sister's sixteenth birthday. She was with my grandparents
(29:08):
of the Jersey Shore. We're going to drive down and
visit her, and my father and I got stuck on
a traffic jam in Waterbury, Connecticut. We were arguing about
what to do with this satellite, and at one point
I just said, I don't care what you do with it.
Show football all weekend, see if I care, And for
the first time all day, he didn't yell back at me.
(29:28):
He's like, what's show sports all weekend long? That's great?
And then about an hour later we figured out not
just on the weekend, but all sports all day every day.
And you know what, I tell that in the twenty
first century you lose a little of flavor. But you
remember in the seventies there were only three networks. Not
everybody had remote control. The most important factor in determining
(29:52):
your ratings was the lead in show. If you came
in after a top rated show, you had an audience.
And we said we will beat the in. A sports
fan will turn on our network before turning on one
of the other three. And that's just what happened.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Well, and I think I saw it the other day.
I think ninety six of the top one hundred shows
on TV last year were NFL games. Sports have become
sort of the American focus.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
They've become the American focus, but also the rest of
the media landscape has become so fragmented. The term we
used in nineteen seventy nine was narrow casting. The idea
was you had these three networks were broadcasting, and we
were going to be for a narrow target audience. We've
lost that distinction.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
I had a parallel story. I talked to Ted Turner
one time. He owned Channel seventeen, which was showing old reruns,
and he read this article in the trade journal that
time Warner was looking at a nationwide system and he thought,
you know, they're really smart, so he actually put Channel
seventeen on satellite faster than time Warner could study putting
(31:03):
HBO up, and then he bought the Braves because he
needed filler for Channel seventeen.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
So the very first cable convention I ever went to
when we were exploring this was in New Hampshire and
Superstation TBS was going to come up and make a
presentation and Turner had this pitch where he said, you
can get NHL hockey and he showed a Bruins game,
and you can get you know, Major League Baseball, and
(31:32):
he showed the Red Sox or something. Really, it was
all Atlanta teams. It was all he'd get on his network,
but he was selling it perstantly.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Then I talked years ago to Jay Rockefeller, who when
he was governor of West Virginia became a fan of
the Braves because it was the only team that was
being sent in by satellite for him to watch.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
Well. In the seventies, UCLA was the best college basketball team,
best college basketball program ever. There are people who argue
that because of the satellite revolution in ESPN, that shifted
the balance of power back to the East Coast, and
the reason being the kids on the East Coast couldn't
stay up late enough to watch the other games when
everybody could watch the East Coast games. I look back
(32:15):
on that story and how much, and first of all,
you know, it's just it's forever ago. You can't really
appreciate how much the world has changed. But little shifts
began to have a big change. In nineteen seventy nine,
when we went on the air, if the President of
the United States gave a speech, all other broadcasting stopped
(32:36):
because the networks all showed his speech. By nineteen eighty eight,
the CBS affiliate in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I lived
at the time, was preempting the President's speech to show
an acc basketball game. Once people began to have an option,
the interest it changed. And think about the political implications.
(32:58):
When Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon spoke to the nation,
almost half or more than half of the TV sets
in the nation were watching them. You don't have anything
like that.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
Today, given your own personal lifetime. Does it make you
an optimist about the future.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Absolutely, I have no doubt that America's best days are
still to come. We probably will get worse before it
gets better. But the reason I'm optimistic one We've been
through this before. Nineteen sixty eight was a terrible year.
You know, there were talks about the end of America
the Cold War. People were thought we could never win it.
But the real reason I'm optimistic is something you mentioned earlier.
(33:38):
Eighty nine percent of America still believe our founding ideals
are worth fighting for free speech, freedom, equality, and self
governance as long as we remain committed to those things.
And we have to fight the elite one percent to
make sure that we carry the day. But that will
ensure a bright future, for our kids, for our children
and grandchildren.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Scott, I want to thank you for joining me. You're
truly one of the exceptional leaders on conveying public opinion,
but also on conveying a buoyant, optimistic sense of an
American future, something which Ronald Reagan would have treasured. And
I want to let our listeners know they can visit
your website at rmgresearch dot com to learn more about
(34:21):
what your public opinion research firm does to help leaders
understand more about key issues. And I think this has
been a great conversation and I'm very grateful to you
take the time well.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
I've enjoyed it. And by the way, anytime you put
my name in the same sentence as Ronald Reagan, I
consider that a good day.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Thank you to my guest, Scott Rasmussen. You can get
a link to view his report on the Elite one
Percent on our show page at Newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld
is produced by Ganglis three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive
producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The
artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special
(35:05):
thanks to the team at Gingrich three sixty. If you've
been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts
and both rate us with five stars and give us
a review so others can learn what it's all about.
Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my
three freeweekly columns at gingrishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter.
(35:26):
I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld
On this episode of Newsworld. My guest today is someone
who The Washington Post is called, quote a driving force
in American politics. I think of him as a personal friend,
somebody who is an entrepreneurial genius. As the president of
RMG Research, Scott Rasmussen has been polling Americans for their
opinions for more than thirty five years. He provides political
(00:27):
and business leaders with insights from his trademarked counter polling platform.
Through a Gold Circle membership program, members got a better
understanding of the public mood through access to Scott's data
and analysis, along with customized briefings. I recently received a
briefing from Scott on his research defining the quote elite
(00:48):
one percent. He did the research with the support of
the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. The results are so intriguing
that I asked him to share his findings with all
of us that I am really pleased to welcome my
guest to my friend, somebody I admire so deeply, Scott
wrestless On. Scott, welcome and thank you for joining me
(01:19):
on Newtsworld.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Well, it's great to be here, you know. I love
talking about this study and about just the world that
we live in. There's so much in politics where people
just kind of go with the flow. They say the
same things they've been saying for decades, and we live
in an ever changing world, so you have to keep
looking at it differently.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
When you go back to your early years, it will
do later on. There was no reason to believe you'd
become a sort of national polling guru. What drew you
into this fascination with public opinion?
Speaker 2 (01:51):
In nineteen eighty four, I sold the business and there
was that Reagan Mondale campaign. I was a little bit
disturbed with the lack of seria discussion on federal budget issues.
Wrote a book on the federal budget. Connie Mack, who
you knew well, wrote the forward to it, and that
got me into the political world. And I started noting
(02:12):
that the questions that were being asked by pollsters didn't
sound like anybody I ever talked to outside of DC.
So I did my very first poll back in the
late eighties. It was on social security, so few people
talked about it back then. At the Wall Street Journal
asked me to write something about it, and it just
took off from there, and I think it was a
(02:33):
different way of looking at the world. I was always
pretty good with numbers. What I think you may even
forget is how much the world has changed of polling.
Tip O'Neil, who was one of your predecessors as Speaker,
was Speaker for a very long time, and if you
look at the national databases, I'll bet there aren't a
dozen national polls on his job approval ratings or favorability ratings.
(02:57):
Now you have polls on the Speaker coming out just
about every day. But it was a different world back then.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
So you entered that world, and then you decided to
launch your first website in the year I remember very
fondly nineteen ninety four when we were doing the contract
with America. What led you to decide to create a website?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Well, because I was too stupid to really know what
the Internet was all about. It was the new thing.
Everybody was talking about it, and I had a media background,
so it did strike me that it was a media platform,
and I thought it was a place that I could
put some of my data and that would attract me
some clients. And what I didn't understand was really how
revolutionary the Internet was going to be. I was startled
(03:39):
by the attention that we got. I was startled by
the response to the online world, and ultimately Rush Limbaugh
would start talking about our work, or Fox News came
on the air and began talking about it. We were
the very first people who ever put polling data directly
to the consumers online, and that became a great success.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
It certainly made you a household name, at least among
the politically aware. You now produce both counterpolling and the
Gold Membership Program. Talk just briefly about that.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Well, counterpolling is something I've actually been doing forever. I
finally came up with a name for it. You know,
it's what I said earlier, the way I put it today.
Most pollsters ask questions in the language of a Georgetown
cocktail party, and again, most voters don't talk that way.
So I consciously look at the mainstream polls that come
out and I try to think, how would I translate
(04:32):
that so a normal person would understand it. When NPR
asks about gender affirming care, I've done research the show.
Nobody knows what that means. So if I ask about
puberty blockers and gender transition surgery, you get wildly different results.
Very few Americans really have an understanding of what woke means.
So if you ask a question about what it means,
(04:54):
what is you know woke or is it good or bad?
The results aren't very meaningful unless you translate a little bit.
So that's the counterpolling. And the Gold Circle membership, which
I'm very pleased to your organization, is one of our members.
It's a membership program that we give access to our
data and our insights, and we hold fun webinars like
we did recently on the Elite one percent.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Can people who are said join the Gold Membership program.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
They sure can, but it's a high dollar entry fee.
It's not a twenty nine to ninety five subscription.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
I have to say, the quality of the information you
provide is extraordinary. In frankly, when I go on Fox
News fairly often, between the program we run on America's
New Majority Project and the program you run, I feel
like I'm reasonably confident talking about the values of the
American people. I'm a big advocate of Lincoln's admonition that
(05:46):
with public sentiment, anything as possible, and without public centiment
nothing as possible. And I'm appalled at Washington's isolation from
public sentiment. I mean, there's a major reason why we
have the current political eruption that we have is that
this city has become a fortress of lobbyist interest groups
and bureaucracies against the rest of the country. It's kind
(06:09):
of amazing.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
I just want to jump in there on something. You know,
I was really fortunate as a high school student. My
best friend's father went to school with a guy named
Joanapolitan who was legendary. He polled on John F. Kennedy's campaign,
and Lyndon Johnson was the first person known as a
political consultant. He gave me an hour of his time
as a high school student to talk about the way
(06:31):
he saw the world, and one of the things that
he said was that you should never underestimate the intelligence
of the American people, but you should never overestimate their
level of political knowledge. And I believe official Washington these
days does the opposite. They underestimate their intelligence and they
overestimate how much they pay attention to politics.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Neapolitan wrote a book called The Election Game and How
to Win It, which I used as a bible for years.
I mean, the ninety four cam Pain was in part
designed based on Joseph Neapolitan's insights. It's very very so
I had no idea you had that relationship.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Yeah. I still am amazed the role that he had
in the world, that he gave me that time as
a kid who really didn't appreciate how special it was.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
I'm intrigued because you do so many polls and you
have such a depth of experience that the story we
were talking about earlier before we began this tape was
that you noticed an anomaly of only three or four
people out of a thousand person sample, and then you
began looking for it. Talk through how you came to
the elite one percent.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
Well, the first thing, you know, I look at poles
all the time. We do a minimum of two national
surveys a week. I look at our data and other data,
and one of the things that first caught my eye
was there was a huge gap between the views of
postgraduate Americans and everybody else. There's a lot of talk
in the political world about the diploma divide those with
(07:57):
and without a college degree, but in act, the gap
between those with a postgraduate degree and a bachelor's degree
is often bigger than the gap between those with a
bachelor's degree and no degree, so I began looking at that.
I also noticed that people who lived in very heavily
densely populated urban areas more than ten thousand people per
(08:19):
square mile, were also way out of touch with the
American people, and not surprisingly, upper income people were as well.
I had a theory that if you combined all three
of these you might find something unique. And the logic
of it was, if you get a postgraduate degree and
go to live in Manhattan or Washington, you might have
different attitudes than if you have a postgraduate degree and
(08:42):
go to live in Cedar Rapids or McKinney, Texas or something.
There's only about eight or ten people in our normal
samples that have all three of those attributes. So I
combined about twenty five surveys, got a sample of a
few hundred people in the elite world, and I was stunned.
The entire population and all those surveys, Joe Biden's job
(09:04):
approval rating was forty one percent. Among the elite group,
it was eighty two percent. So even with a small sample,
I knew this was something worth pursuing. It's very expensive
to pull these people. I did a couple of pilot
studies just to see if I was onto something. And
then fortunately the Committee to Unleashed Prosperity was interested, and
(09:27):
we did two surveys of this elite one percent and
the results, I don't know whether to describe them as
fascinating or terrifying or a little of both.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
It is terrifying. You begin to realize how deep the
cultural divide is. And these are the people who run
the universities, run the news media, run much of the government,
serve as judges and prosecutors. I mean, it is the
power center of the United States, and they are totally
different from the rest of us.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
That's right. The first thing we did every question that
we asked when we surveyed this elite one percent group,
we did a companion survey of one thousand voters just
to see where the gaps were. The first question that
caught my attention was among the elite one percent, forty
seven percent believe there is too much individual freedom in America.
(10:18):
Among most voters, fifty seven percent say there's not enough freedom.
So we were having wildly different views. And we also
then noticed there were a couple of key subgroups. One
that's not a surprise given the current news cycle. There
were people who went to about a dozen elite universities.
They make up about half of this elite world, and
(10:41):
their views were even further out of touch with the
American people and the other subgroup where there's people who
talk politics every day. So if you can picture the
elite one percent, some of them are out doing business
or doing other things. Some of them are obsessed with politics.
And among that politically obsessed group, sixty nine percent say
(11:01):
there is too much individual freedom in America. It's hard
to imagine that, but that is the view of the people.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
When the elite one percent tell you that there's too
much freedom in America? What do you think they mean
by that?
Speaker 2 (11:16):
First of all, I know what they answered. The question
they answered was we asked, very straightforward, is there too
much individual freedom, too much government control? Or is the
balance about right. We know that voters and the elite
one percent gave wildly different answers, and it's kind of
a mind boggling stat What I think they mean is
(11:36):
a little bit of we need to restore order in
the country. We need rules for everybody to play by.
The elites know what the rules are, and we're frustrated
that the American people aren't following. They were frustrated that
a lot of people didn't want to follow advice during
the pandemic. They're frustrated when parents go to complain to
(12:00):
their school boards. I think that's where the elites see
that is a real threat.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
These are the people who would force you to buy
an electric car, and would force you to give up
your gas stove, and would feel that you were being
selfish if you didn't do what you were told.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Well, and actually they're probably disappointed that you don't thank
them for it, because they're busy saving the world on
your behalf. You know. Sometimes I say that their view
is they don't want government of buying for the people.
They want government of and buy the elites, and they
think it's good for the people. I mean, that's sort
of the mindset here.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
So you described a dirty dozen of league universities. Can
you describe that detriment? Because I thought it was fascinating.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Yeah, so the dirty universities. I didn't come up with
the list. Actually, there were some academic research done back
in the Obama years and it's been updated ever since.
And if you look at the politically influential elites, or
if you look at the corporate board elites, or if
you were to go to the philanthropic world and the
(13:19):
charitable world, about half of the people that are dominating
those institutions went to one of twelve schools, either graduate
or undergraduate. Most of them are the Ivy League, but
you've also got Stanford in Chicago and a few others
in there, and you know, these are schools that do
(13:40):
produce most of the leadership. In fact, just to give
you a sense of scale, before Amy Coney Barrett was
lifted up to the Supreme Court, the last justice who
did not go to one of these twelve elite schools
was Thirdgode Marshall in nineteen sixty seven. And that's a
vast change. In the forties and fifties, there was a
(14:01):
lot more diversity about where people came from. If you're dirty.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Dozen are Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, Cornell, MIT,
and the University of Chicago.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
And some of those have been in the news lately.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
In a sense, you know, maybe the advice the next
administration is, if they come from one of these, don't
appoint them.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
That would be a good start.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
I want to be very clear in this. I'm not
anti education or even anti elite or anti expert. We
need expertise, but it's got to be accountable. If I
have a cold and I go to the doctor, the
doctor has expertise that I don't have, but I make
the final decisions. And when we have a government, we
(14:51):
do need experts to handle a lot of tasks, but
there still needs to be accountability to the voters.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
I noticed you surveyed Harvard freshman class, and I was
actually startled by your numbers.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
First off, I didn't do that survey. Harvard did that.
Harvard Crimson released it. But the numbers are absolutely stunning. Again,
only six percent of the entering class at Harvard are Protestant.
Basically half are either agnostic or atheists. So if you
want to talk about values and faith, it doesn't look
anything like America.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
It's like eight to one agnostic or atheist over Protestant.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Right, and it's also about eight to one progressive over conservative.
And at a time when most Americans are saying we
don't want affirmative action to determine college admissions, these freshmen
overwhelmingly support it. You know what troubles me about this
is if our leadership funnel is being narrowed down to
(15:51):
these schools and their student body and their teachings are
so out of touch with America, that's problematic for our
system of government. You know, during the tea party era,
I spoke at Harvard and had a brown bag lunch
afterwards with some of the faculty members, and one of them,
she was very sincere and very frustrated, said why won't
(16:15):
the American people let us lead? That's what we were
trained to do. And my first comment was, they don't
like where you're leading. But the second point, it really
the big issue here is what an arrogant, entitled attitude
that reflects that the rest of us are too stupid
to play a part in the leadership of our nation.
And I think that's part of the problem.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
The Crimson survey point out that one point forty six
percent of the faculty think they're conservatives. One point forty
six percent. This is virtually insane. But there's a number
in here which I was very struck by that you
said was the most frightening number you'd seen in polling. Ironically,
(16:56):
it is the opposite of the message we're told over
and over by the establishment talk testament about the willingness
to steal elections.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
So this is one of those questions you put out
you're never quite sure what to expect. We asked a
thousand voters, what if your favorite candidate lost a close
election but their campaign team knew they could cheat and
get away with it. Would you rather have them cheat
and win or basically play fair and lose the election?
(17:25):
Only seven percent of voters said they wanted to cheat
and win, which, you know, I wish it was one percent,
but still seven percent means that the overwhelming majority of
Americans are still on board with fair elections. When we
asked the elite one percent that same question, thirty five
percent of them said they would rather cheat and win.
(17:46):
But what was really terrifying in that most terrifying result
I've ever seen the elite one percent who were talking
politics every day, that politically obsessed elite, sixty nine percent
of them would rather cheat than follow what the voters decided.
That's a win at all cost mentality, that's we know
(18:09):
best and we don't want voters to get in our
way mentality, And it speaks of the fact that they
trust the government and they don't trust the voters.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
I was very struck with how willing the elites are
to impose on us. You point out that seventy seven
percent of the elite one percent would impose strict restrictions
in rationing on the private use of gas, meat, and electricity.
If there was a straight up election with that as
the referendum issue, these people would be crushed by popular
(18:40):
will right absolutely.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
And you know, there are a lot of individual things
they would like to ban SUVs and gas powered vehicles.
Some of that can be attributed to the fact that
if you're in those urban areas, you don't try very much.
But I think a lot of it can be attributed
to the fact that the elites know the rules won't
apply to them. That is a factor in all of this.
(19:03):
And I think it's very easy to talk about these
issues without really thinking about how big that cultural divide is.
But when you've got a bunch of people who are
in power, who believe they should overturn elections, they should
do what they think is right, and that the American
people have too much individual freedom, what happens when they
(19:25):
leave their bubble and go home for the holidays and
talk to regular voters who don't share that view.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
I suspect they don't. They would be too painful. And
I notice, for example, one of the places it's rapidly
moving towards a real crescendo, seventy two percent of the
elite one percent would ban gas powered vehicles, and I
just saw a poll that said six percent of the
country wants to buy electric vehicles. Now, the idea that
the government's going to impose on ninety four percent of
(19:51):
the country has to be as anti democracy, an anti
popular government as anything I've ever seen.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Yes, And I think the good news in this is
that voters are pushing back, that there is a reluctance
to embrace all of this. It's a chilling mindset that
we have. One of the things we want to do
at our MG research with our continued focus on this,
is to shine a light on just how far out
of touch these people are, because it is just beyond comprehension.
(20:22):
It is something. By the way, you love history, probably
even more than I do. But Woodrow Wilson dreamed of
this scenario back in the nineteenth century. This was the
founding of the progressive movement was to have a specially
educated group of civil servants who would be insulated from
voters and do what's best for the country. So that's
what we're heading towards, and voters, fortunately are people.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
It always somehow involves the elite themselves not being affected.
I noticed that fifty five percent of the elite one
percent favor banning non essential air travel, which they would define.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Of course, on the.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Other hand, carry has to fly by private plane absolutely.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
And look, we see this all the time in all
kinds of survey results, that people like to impose rules
on others. That's just when you have to apply it
to yourself, it gets a little challenging.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Having been a congressman from Georgia, fifty three percent of
the elite one percent would ban private air conditioning. I mean,
you have to wonder what climate they live in. It
would be like banning heat in the Northeast exactly.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
We all get caught in our bubbles, and we all
have a circle of people. We begin to listen and
things begin to make sense, And all I can really
believe is that you know, in this world there are
so many people talking about climate change is going to
end humanity within twelve years unless we do something that
nothing seems extreme compared to that.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
One of the things I'm struck with that you really
bring to life is that the rise of the administrative state,
the power of the bureaucracy, has also been matched by
the rise of distrust of that very state by the
average person. So it's a real tension between we the
people and we the bureaucrats.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
You know, one of the things I mentioned in the
presentation on this there are three times as many government
regulators today as there were in nineteen seventy two, So
the administrative state has grown tremendously, and with things like
the Chevron decision, they were given evermore authority. Interestingly, from
that same time, from nineteen seventy two until now, a
(22:54):
majority of Americans have never trusted the federal government to
do the right thing most of the time. So you've
got this growth in the administrative state combined with a
declining trust in the government, and that creates not just
a tension between bureaucrats and voters, but it creates real
questions about the legitimacy of the government.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
You point out that eighty nine percent of the voters
still believe in America's founding ideas. That's a much bigger
number than I would have guessed after all these years
of brainwashing by the left.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Yeah, we have done a lot of research on this,
and even on things like so if you talk to
people who say they like socialism, who a lot of
Americans would instinctively say, Wow, they don't like America's founding ideals.
Turns out their definition of socialism isn't what some of
us older folks remember it to be. Most people who
(23:48):
say they like socialism define it ultimately as decision making
closer to home. They don't think of it as an
economic system. So the words change along the way. But
people have a very strong distrust of centralized power, and
the ideals of freedom, equality and self governance are really important.
(24:08):
We did a survey years back on hate speech. We
read a dozen really horrific statements, you know, about all
Mexicans coming into our country, our rapist type of things,
I mean, really bad stuff, and not single one of
those statements did most people think should be banned. They
thought they were atrocious, they thought they would run away
(24:29):
from anybody talking like that, but they didn't think they
should be banned. And the reason was they didn't trust
the government to make those decisions.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
What additional polling do you plan to do on the
lead one percent?
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Oh, we have great plans. We're looking for support for
it right now. But one of the things we're going
to do is a survey on what they believe that
voters think. We have some indications already that they actually
think voters don't disagree with them as much as they think.
The survey we did so so far was mostly regulatory
(25:01):
and finance and economic things. We want to get into
some cultural issues, whether it's guns or trans policies or
anything else. We want to begin to understand really who
they are and where they're coming from a better definition.
So we'll do a lot of research on that. And
then we also want to do some research on the
(25:22):
people who are managing the federal government today, what are
their views, and so that's going to be an ongoing
project as we begin to roll this out. I'll tell
you one thing that struck me very recently. We took
a look at our data in the month leading up
to October seventh, and then we compared it to the
(25:42):
same results in December, So a couple of months later,
after the horrific attack on Israel. Among most Americans, their
opinion of Joe Biden never changed, but among those with
a postgraduate degree it fell by eighteen points. I think
that's because they were more supportive of Hamas than the
(26:03):
rest of the country. It just speaks to how out
of touch they are, and that's why I want to
keep researching this group to learn more about them.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
If you do a similar pattern of senior bureaucrats, you
will really do the country a great service because I
have a hunch that they are, in their own unique way,
as arrogant and as willing to impose and as indifferent
to the American people as the elite one percent.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
I would probably guess, and I don't have any data
on this, so it's just a guess right now that
they seek the consent of the one percent rather than
the consent of the government.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
I think that's right. That's why I think this is
a brilliant study. Now I have to take just a
minute because your background is so astonishing and very few
people know about it. I mean, you grew up in
a very entrepreneurial environment. Can you talk about the early
days of entrepreneurship.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
It's funny when you put it like that, because I
can't remember any other days. My father was into broadcasting.
I did my first commercial, my first radio commercial when
I was seven years old. We got involved with the
New England Whalers and the World Hockey Association. I did
some announcing there. We always had side projects going on.
(27:15):
That was just the world we lived in. You couldn't
get the Whalers on TV. We kept looking for ways
to make that happen. And along the way, my father
and I learned about this crazy new thing called the
satellite and satellite transmission. And people don't understand how different
that was. In nineteen seventy eight. You know, there's only
(27:35):
one college football game on a week. College basketball had
a couple of national games a year. That was it.
Most sports teams weren't on. That was the environment we
were in. And to send a signal around the country
you had to go to AT and T and they
would just charge you by the mile. The satellite came along.
RCA put Satcom one into orbit. We could send a
(27:57):
signal around the US for less than a cost to
send the same signal around the state of Connecticut via
traditional landlines. And when we learned that we thought, Wow,
there's something big here, and we ended up creating a
little network called ESPN and it's done pretty well since then.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
That's wild. So it really started though around a particular
hockey team and how do you build an audience for
that hockey team?
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Right? And we were doing everything you could imagine to
try and get them on TV. We actually had a proposal.
We met with all the cable operators in Connecticut and said,
we're going to get the Whalers Yukon basketball and Bristol
Red Sox baseball and we're going to produce it for
you guys. And they laughed us out of the room,
but they did tell us about the satellite. And you
(28:44):
know when we found out about the satellite, Al Parnello
was the guy who was selling that for our CAAI
still keep in touch with him. He was telling us
how different the world was going to be, and we
knew there was something there. We couldn't put our finger
on it. And the day that we actually came up
up with the idea, it was August sixteenth, nineteen seventy eight,
my little sister's sixteenth birthday. She was with my grandparents
(29:08):
of the Jersey Shore. We're going to drive down and
visit her, and my father and I got stuck on
a traffic jam in Waterbury, Connecticut. We were arguing about
what to do with this satellite, and at one point
I just said, I don't care what you do with it.
Show football all weekend, see if I care, And for
the first time all day, he didn't yell back at me.
(29:28):
He's like, what's show sports all weekend long? That's great?
And then about an hour later we figured out not
just on the weekend, but all sports all day every day.
And you know what, I tell that in the twenty
first century you lose a little of flavor. But you
remember in the seventies there were only three networks. Not
everybody had remote control. The most important factor in determining
(29:52):
your ratings was the lead in show. If you came
in after a top rated show, you had an audience.
And we said we will beat the in. A sports
fan will turn on our network before turning on one
of the other three. And that's just what happened.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Well, and I think I saw it the other day.
I think ninety six of the top one hundred shows
on TV last year were NFL games. Sports have become
sort of the American focus.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
They've become the American focus, but also the rest of
the media landscape has become so fragmented. The term we
used in nineteen seventy nine was narrow casting. The idea
was you had these three networks were broadcasting, and we
were going to be for a narrow target audience. We've
lost that distinction.
Speaker 1 (30:39):
I had a parallel story. I talked to Ted Turner
one time. He owned Channel seventeen, which was showing old reruns,
and he read this article in the trade journal that
time Warner was looking at a nationwide system and he thought,
you know, they're really smart, so he actually put Channel
seventeen on satellite faster than time Warner could study putting
(31:03):
HBO up, and then he bought the Braves because he
needed filler for Channel seventeen.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
So the very first cable convention I ever went to
when we were exploring this was in New Hampshire and
Superstation TBS was going to come up and make a
presentation and Turner had this pitch where he said, you
can get NHL hockey and he showed a Bruins game,
and you can get you know, Major League Baseball, and
(31:32):
he showed the Red Sox or something. Really, it was
all Atlanta teams. It was all he'd get on his network,
but he was selling it perstantly.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Then I talked years ago to Jay Rockefeller, who when
he was governor of West Virginia became a fan of
the Braves because it was the only team that was
being sent in by satellite for him to watch.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
Well. In the seventies, UCLA was the best college basketball team,
best college basketball program ever. There are people who argue
that because of the satellite revolution in ESPN, that shifted
the balance of power back to the East Coast, and
the reason being the kids on the East Coast couldn't
stay up late enough to watch the other games when
everybody could watch the East Coast games. I look back
(32:15):
on that story and how much, and first of all,
you know, it's just it's forever ago. You can't really
appreciate how much the world has changed. But little shifts
began to have a big change. In nineteen seventy nine,
when we went on the air, if the President of
the United States gave a speech, all other broadcasting stopped
(32:36):
because the networks all showed his speech. By nineteen eighty eight,
the CBS affiliate in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I lived
at the time, was preempting the President's speech to show
an acc basketball game. Once people began to have an option,
the interest it changed. And think about the political implications.
(32:58):
When Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon spoke to the nation,
almost half or more than half of the TV sets
in the nation were watching them. You don't have anything
like that.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
Today, given your own personal lifetime. Does it make you
an optimist about the future.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
Absolutely, I have no doubt that America's best days are
still to come. We probably will get worse before it
gets better. But the reason I'm optimistic one We've been
through this before. Nineteen sixty eight was a terrible year.
You know, there were talks about the end of America
the Cold War. People were thought we could never win it.
But the real reason I'm optimistic is something you mentioned earlier.
(33:38):
Eighty nine percent of America still believe our founding ideals
are worth fighting for free speech, freedom, equality, and self
governance as long as we remain committed to those things.
And we have to fight the elite one percent to
make sure that we carry the day. But that will
ensure a bright future, for our kids, for our children
and grandchildren.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Scott, I want to thank you for joining me. You're
truly one of the exceptional leaders on conveying public opinion,
but also on conveying a buoyant, optimistic sense of an
American future, something which Ronald Reagan would have treasured. And
I want to let our listeners know they can visit
your website at rmgresearch dot com to learn more about
(34:21):
what your public opinion research firm does to help leaders
understand more about key issues. And I think this has
been a great conversation and I'm very grateful to you
take the time well.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
I've enjoyed it. And by the way, anytime you put
my name in the same sentence as Ronald Reagan, I
consider that a good day.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Thank you to my guest, Scott Rasmussen. You can get
a link to view his report on the Elite one
Percent on our show page at Newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld
is produced by Ganglis three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive
producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The
artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special
(35:05):
thanks to the team at Gingrich three sixty. If you've
been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts
and both rate us with five stars and give us
a review so others can learn what it's all about.
Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my
three freeweekly columns at gingrishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter.
(35:26):
I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld
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