Transcript for Scott Rasmussen Interview on the Beyond Speaking Podcast
Brian Lord sits down with Scott Rasmussen to discuss the complexities of opinion polling, the importance of asking questions from multiple perspectives and some surprising statistics about different societal groups, particularly focusing on the politically active elite. Scott also touches on historical polling data trends, the influence of economic perceptions on political outcomes, and the significant gap between the general public and the elite regarding policy and governance.
Podcast Episode · Beyond Speaking · April 16, 2024 · 24m
Scott: Probably the single most chilling polling statistic I have found, and as you mentioned at the top, I've been doing this a long time, there's a group in this elite 1% that we call the politically obsessed. These are the ones who talk politics every day. They're active in the government.
And we asked a question that I threw on, having no idea what to expect, which was: suppose there was a close election and your candidate lost, but their campaign team knew they could cheat and get away with it. Would you want them to cheat and win or accept the results of the election? And among voters, only 7% wanted them to cheat and win. But among the politically obsessed group of the elite 1%, 69% would rather cheat than lose that election.
Intro: Welcome to the Beyond Speaking podcast from Premiere Speakers Bureau, featuring in-depth conversations with the world's most in-demand keynote speakers.
Brian: Hi, I'm Brian Lord. Welcome to the Beyond Speaking Podcast. Our guest today is Scott Rasmussen. Scott is a public opinion pollster, author, and president of RMG Research. He's been pulling Americans for their opinions for over 35 years, and he co-founded ESPN to Boot. So, Scott, thank you so much for coming on and being a guest here on the Beyond Speaking Podcast.
Scott: Well, Brian, it's great to chat with you. We've got a lot of good things going on these days. And you know, when you say something like polling for 35 years, it makes me seem really old.
Brian: I know. Well, I've been so I've been this will be almost 30 years for me being an agent. We both went to this little school called DePauw in Indiana. And so I guess we've both been at it for a while. We were saying beforehand, like our last interview we did was on Skype. So like this was like pre-Zoom. So it's kind of crazy how things come around again, but you're you definitely have that sage wisdom to impart. So I'm excited to get to that.
Scott: Great.
Brian: So my first question is, you know, you're a pollster. Your big thing that you have to be amazing at doing is asking questions. So how do you ask a good question?
Scott: You know, there's a fantasy out there among people that criticize polls that there is a way to design the perfect question. And in reality, there isn't. You have to ask questions from six or seven different points of view and begin to look at the differences. You know, when I started back in the late 80s, there were still primarily three television networks that dominated. We had sort of a common news base and some common language. So maybe you could get away with one or two points of view.
But in today's world, no matter what issue you talk about, whether it's a healthcare issue or what's going on in the Middle East, different segments of the population react differently depending on the terminology you use. So the first thing you have to do is just be open to the idea that you're gonna have to come at it from a variety of angles.
Brian: Any questions you normally ask around a specific topic or or broad question?
Scott: That depends on what the topic is. You know, I've been polling on immigration issues for 20 or 25 years. So I've got thousands of questions that we've asked about that. When an issue comes up, you know, it's a brand new issue. You try and figure out what you're going to do about it. You know, right after October 7th, we try to figure out how are we gonna ask about the conflict there without using loaded terms, but also how are we gonna ask about it in ways that give us some tracking information.
And when you do something like that, one of the things you have to remember, words of wisdom from one of the very first pollsters and political consultants, Joe Napolitan, he said you should never underestimate the intelligence of the American people and never overestimate their level of knowledge about things in the political world.
I think that's really important. We have to remember that people who are in a particular bubble, again, whether it's a corporate bubble or a political bubble, we have our terminology. We have things we all everybody we talk to knows about. Most Americans aren't in our bubbles, so you have to come up with ways to approach them to get useful information.
Brian: Well, one of the things that's great about what you do is it's such a broad cross section, a broad way that you do things. So it's not just political. In fact, a big, big amount of it is corporate. So, you know, like I'm booking somebody for maybe the financial industry or the automotive industry or manufacturing or something.
So let's say that you are going to go speak to a specific type of group. We'll just say finance for this one. What is it that you can draw on to sort of customize to that group?
Scott: Well, first we have, if it was a finance group, we have a long history of data about how people perceive the economy, how people perceive their own particular finances. We have some questions that we've added in the post pandemic era, just because things have changed a little bit.
We ask questions about home ownership and, you know, has the value of your home gone up? To which most people say yes, but then we say, well, If you sold your house, could you buy a comparable one with that money? And most people say no. Well, you know, what are you getting at there?
So we start, we have a decent base of information. And then it depends on what the particular issues are that a company might be interested in. and all of that comes from talking to the client ahead of time, trying to understand what it is they're looking for and what they want to accomplish.
I do point out that while we do these presentations, politics does play a part of it, because you have to know about the policies that are affecting it. And also, let's be fair, if you talk to a pollster in an election year, everybody wants to talk politics at least a little bit. But it's much more important to think about potential customers and where the industry might be heading.
Brian: What are some of the biggest questions that you're asking right now that tie into sort of the business landscape or the corporate landscape?
Scott: The biggest thing we're trying to get to right now is this, what some people see as a disconnect between what's going on in what the numbers say the economy is doing—that it's going very well, and the fact that so many Americans don't seem too happy with the economy.
Now part of the answer there is that there's a lag. Look if something bad happens, if the price of oil goes up and the price of gas goes up a dollar a gallon, consumer confidence will fall tomorrow. If it fell back to the original price a day later, it would take six months before people caught up. So part of it is there's just a lag. People react instantly to bad news.
But I think there's something else going on here, which is there's two economies. There's an affluent economy where people are doing very, very well, and they don't notice things like inflation because it doesn't really have an impact. And then there's a group of people who are not as well off. A half of America lives paycheck to paycheck. So when the price of gas goes up or the price of groceries goes up, all of a sudden they have a problem. They have to cut back on one or the other.
You add to that some of the housing issues and interest rates. And all of a sudden you begin to see people who are maybe getting started, people who want to buy their first home, people in different situations, they have reasons to be pessimistic.
Brian: Yeah. And that is one of those things that it's a little bit different for everyone. I know one of the popular things that you talk about and get asked to speak about is called the Elite 1% and the Battle for America's Soul. Kind of can you develop that idea a little bit more?
Scott: Yes. And this began out of some other research we were doing, looking at lots of data. We noticed that there were three segments of the population that, let's just say, they had different views than most other Americans. These were people who lived in very densely populated urban areas, like 10,000 people per square mile or more, made more than $150,000, and most importantly had a postgraduate degree. Because those were the postgraduate degrees.
And by the way, I'm in that group too. So this isn't just trashing somebody else, but those of the postgraduate degree often have views that are a little bit different than most Americans. So we decided what happens if we combine those three? Let's take a look at who this group might be. Because maybe if you have a postgraduate degree, you're gonna think of going to a place like Manhattan rather than to Cedar Rapids or some other place. And what we found was absolutely stunning.
While most Americans give President Biden a job approval rating of about 40%, this group says his job approval rating is about 80%. Big difference. When most Americans say there's not enough individual freedom in America today. This group tends to say that there's too much individual freedom. So there's a wildly different perspective.
And the one that really blew me away until I thought about it, and that was trust in government. For the last 50 years, Pugh and others have been asking questions about how often do you trust the government to do the right thing? And for 50 years, fewer than half of Americans have said we trust the government to do the right thing most of the time or all of the time. So it's been 50 years since most view voters have that view. And yet among this elite group, it was over 70%.
One of the reasons I came to one of the conclusions I eventually came to, it's because these people are the government. They know it. It's not a conspiracy, it's a fraternity. You know, you mentioned you and I both went to DePauw. Well, if you're in a certain world in that postgraduate world in these elite circles, you can get to anybody you need to. And I think when you know a person that increases your trust.
Brian: Yeah, that's interesting. I'm curious to know, you're talking about freedom. So the one that freedom got me, like, too much freedom? Like how do you get to that point? Or did you do any research about why that's a thought?
Scott: We just did a little bit. In fact, in the next week or two, we're going out to do our next Elite 1% survey. So we're going to be continuing to explore this throughout the year. But one thing that we did was we asked different questions about what should we do to fight climate change? And what kind of restrictions would you support?
And this elite group was in favor of very strict rationing on things like cars and gas-powered vehicles and private air conditioning and non-essential air travel. Most Americans say we're not at all in favor of those things. I mean the numbers who supported in the general public are so low it's not even a topic for serious discussion.
But I think if you look at that, some of the items, if you're living in those heavily populated urban areas, you don't use a car. So it's easy for them to say, well, of course we should restrict cars. And if you're being a little bit cynical, maybe you say, Well, of course, they don't mind restricting some other things like non-essential air travel, because they would perceive that all of their air travel is essential.
So we did find specific things like that where there was a difference, and probably the single most chilling polling statistic I have found, and as you mentioned at the top, I've been doing this a long time. There's a group in this elite 1% that we call the politically obsessed. These are the ones who talk politics every day. They're active in the government.
And we asked a question that I threw on, having no idea what to expect, which was suppose there was a close election and your candidate lost, but their campaign team knew they could cheat and get away with it. Would you want them to cheat and win or accept the results of the election? And among voters, only 7% wanted them to cheat and win. But among the politically obsessed group of the elite 1%, 69% would rather cheat than lose that election. Just stunning.
And I think it reflects more broadly that there's an elite group that doesn't have a lot of respect for the voters. They tend to think that the rest of us would be better off if we would just let them be in charge. In fact, I spoke at Harvard one time during the Tea Party era. And we had a brown bag lunch after the presentation. And one of the professors said, why won't the American people just let us lead? That's what we were trained to do. And of course my answer was they don't like where you're leading. That was the issue.
So that's part of it. And I think it's a really important dynamic in American politics today. It's bigger than Republican versus Democrat. You know, it's fundamentally a question. The reason we call it the battle for America's soul is are we really going to remain a country that is committed to freedom, equality, and self-governance? Kind of the founding ideals, or are we going to move to a more top down, lease form of government? And, bluntly, there have always been people in our country pushing for that, but that's where the fight is today.
Brian: Yeah, that's amazing. You know, as we're coming up here too, I know a lot of companies, organizations want that 2024 election outlook. So as you're coming up to this, what are the hot topics that people want to talk about that you're doing research into?
Scott: There's two issues in 2024 right now that dominate everything else. One is the economy, because that always dominates. That's always an important issue. When we talk about the economy in political terms, the most important single indicator is how do you feel about your own personal finances? Are they getting better or worse?
Our most recent survey found that 21% of voters said their finances are getting better, 41% said worse. Now, this is not the economy overall, this is their personal finances. If those numbers don't improve, President Biden has a very difficult task ahead of him. the more those numbers improve, the better off he'll be. So I usually tell people, you know, if you tell me what those numbers will be next November, I'll tell you who's going to win the election.
But this year there's another issue, and that is immigration border security. A phenomenally powerful issue. It's one that President Biden and his team, I think, misread or overlooked early on. I still don't fully know what to do about it. And it's not immigration. It's not a question of do people want to stop immigration. It is very clearly about border security and illegal immigration. Voters view it as a national security threat because while they understand why most people want to come here, they also know if the border is open, bad guys can sneak across.
And this issue is another example of where the elite 1% and the rest of the country are much different. We ask, every week we do this, an open-ended question to a thousand voters: what's the most important issue in your world today? What's the most important political issue? And as I mentioned, immigration always right up there with the economy. When we asked a thousand members of the elite 1% the same open-end question. Not a single one of them mentioned border security or immigration. Just a huge gap. And that's by the way, probably the reason it hasn't been addressed.
Brian: Yeah. Well so out of curiosity, what is their number one thing?
Scott: Well, their number one thing is the economy. And then shortly after that, you get to questions about Donald Trump.
Brian: There we go. So on this too, so you know, we've got sort of the broad American public or broad America looking forward to these things. When it comes to businesses, when businesses are looking at the election, I'm obviously the economy's in there, but any specifics that business leaders are saying, Hey, we want to know about this in terms of the election?
Scott: You know, I think a lot of business leaders, first of all, are trying to figure out are we ever going to get beyond the instability of this 50-50 electorate? It seems, you know, one year you have a Democrat elected with a Republican Congress, but not really in control anywhere. It doesn't seem like we can have a functioning system. So that's one thing we hear about a lot. And on that I'm very optimistic.
We haven't had a presidential landslide since 1984. But if you look back at American history, we go through periods like this. We went through one of the late 60s and early 70s where people were really disenchanted and thought America's best days had come to an end. Jimmy Carter was elected and it was kind of a depressing time for many Americans. Ronald Reagan was elected and spoke in a different way, pushed things in a little different manner, and we had a brighter period of time.
I think we're going to come to another moment like that where there's a leader elected, somebody younger than our current nominees for president, somebody who will find a language to speak that's more broadly inclusive of America's hopes and dreams. And that person will be able to, I won't say unify the country, but they'll at least have a stable governing mandate.
Beyond that, there's lots of industry-specific questions, you know, whether it's healthcare or energy topics and how do we talk about these in a current regulatory environment. But every industry has its own niche. I can talk to you about the politics in general, I can talk to somebody about the overall attitudes. But when you begin to talk to a group about their industry, you want to make sure you address some of the concerns that they're facing, not just the overall political environment.
Brian: One of other things that's really interesting about you too, and you know, talking to business leaders and everything else is that you've been in their shoes for some of this. You know, you helped co-found ESPN. What are some of the lessons that you learned through that process?
Scott: The biggest lesson, and you know, you have to understand the absurdity of ESPN. You know, this was the late 70s. There were no cable television networks like we know them today. We learned about this new technology called the satellite. And we started the company with a $9,000 cash advance on a credit card. And several months later, we were in front of Getty Oil pitching them for funding.
And our initial pitch, by the way, we asked them for $5 million to tide us over while they evaluated this great opportunity. And they initially said to us, well, we don't consider anything for less than 10 million. So we went back and gave them a revised pitch asking for 10 million and they gave us 5 million.
But by May of 79, we began the process and learned about the satellite in early 78. Then we came up with the idea that is now ESPN on August 16th, 1978. I know it because it was my sister's 16th birthday and we totally ignored her. And then we got to the next May and we had spent about 4.9 out of the 5 million Getty had given us, and they had to make a decision. And they brought us into this room and the Getty executive suite. They had a boomerang shaped table, and we were on the inside of it. and they had officials and lawyers and everybody on all sides of us throwing questions from everywhere, trying to intimidate us, and they did a pretty good job.
And at some point, somebody asked me a question about the projections for 1988. And again, think about this. We're in 1979 for an industry that doesn't exist, but I was young and good with math. And so I gave an utterly precise and totally worthless answer, in which I explained, you know, there's 12 million cable households in the US right now. If you assume cable grows at this rate, and this percentage of them pick up the satellite, and this percentage of that percentage get us, and we get this audience share and this CPM.
And the answer is obvious. And the math worked. But Sid Peterson was sitting right across from me. He was the brand new CEO at Getty. And he looked at me and he said, he doesn't know what the revenue is gonna be in 1988 any more than we do. What you have to look at are the fundamental assumptions. You know, will cable grow? Will it adopt this new technology? Will people watch an all sports channel?
And most important of all, will advertisers sponsor what in those days we called narrow casting? And he said, you know, if those assumptions work out, this is a big win. And if not, you know, it'll be a dry hole. We make decisions like this in the oil industry every day. Let's decide.
And for me, that was a really powerful lesson. It's easy to get caught up in the numbers. It's easy to get caught up in the political or policy details. But as I just mentioned, you know, tell me what people are thinking about their personal finances in November, and I'll tell you who's going to win the election. There are certain fundamentals that drive the process.
And when you're talking about doing some of the analysis and reading polling data, you need to focus on those checking your assumptions. What is it that's really driving, you know, the electorate in this case, or customers in some other case? And that's been a big, big lesson for me over the last, wow, almost 40 years on—actually more than 40 years on, that makes me feel real old.
Brian: That's great. Well, Scott, thank you so much for sharing your insights on political, economic outlook, background, questions, and of course, you know, lessons from co-founding ESPN. So thank you for coming on here and being part of the Beyond Speaking Podcast.
Scott: Thanks, Brian.
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