Speaker 1: We are back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the Federalist and
your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge. As always,
you can email the show at radio at the Federalist
dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST, make
sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and of
course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is renowned polster Scott Rasmussen, president of
RMG Research Incorporated. As we check in on the pulse
of America at the dawn of Trump two point zero. Scott,
it is a great pleasure to have you with us
here today on the Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2: Well, it's an honor to be with you and looking
forward to just kind of catching up with all the
things going on in the world around us.
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness, and no dull day in politics these days.
The old saying like drinking from a fire hose, is
I think apropos. Let's begin here. Though you've been doing
this for a long time, you're like me. You have issues,
you have lots of issues to cover. But the first
question I have to ask you is, do you ever
get tired of being right?
Speaker 2: Well, actually, I remember all the times that I've been
wrong more than I remember that, But I'm thankful that
other people forget some of those along the way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, you should consult with Polster in Des Moines,
Iowa these days. She understands exactly how you feel about that.
With the last election. Now, I mean you have You've
been doing this for a long time. You've called a
lot of these races, right. A lot of people in
sixteen pointed at you and said, you're crazy. You think this,
You think this TV star, billionaire businessman has a chance
of winning the presidency.
Speaker 2: You called it.
Speaker 1: Then you called it, of course in twenty twenty four,
and you've called it a lot along the way. What
gave you so much faith that Donald Trump had tapped
into I guess the zeitgeist of American politics in sixteen
and again in twenty four.
Speaker 2: Well, a couple of things in that. First, you know,
a lot of people in the political realm think that
Donald Trump somehow created the Mega movement out of whole cloth,
especially people on the left, think that somehow he's just
conned people into following him. Irrationally and nothing could be
further from the truth. The move was there before Donald
Trump arrived to lead it, before he arrived to give
voice to it. You know, my very first poll back
in the nineteen eighties, so a long time ago, found
that Americans were unhappy that we were carrying an unfair
share of the burden of the NATO defense. So that
feeling was there in the eighties, it grew stronger. Issues
like immigration came up that were growing, and Donald Trump
was the one who stepped forward to lead it. But
I also have to point out something about polsters and polling,
especially in twenty sixteen and again this year. The polling
was actually much better than the legend in twenty sixteen.
What was wrong, what was horribly wrong, was the analysis.
In twenty sixteen, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by
two percentage points. The national polling showed that she would
win it by three points. That's pretty good. When you
look to the states, forty seven states were absolutely no
surprise based on the polling. There were three surprises in
those blue Wall states, but they were a surprise partly
because of the analysis. In Pennsylvania and Michigan. The last
poll in each state showed Donald Trump ahead. The polling
averages showed it to be a pure toss up. The
only state that was really off that year was Wisconsin.
But the analysis is something different in that people, television,
pundits and others couldn't imagine Donald Trump winning. So I
was in the green room at Fox on Election Day
morning and the discussion was the average the polls show
her up by three points, and the tone was, yeah,
but there's always a margin of error. She's going to
win by six probably, and some were saying, and oh,
it'll be even bigger, she might hit double digits. It
never occurred to anybody it could go the other direction
even a bit. So again, there's a difference between polling
and the analysis of polling. And in twenty sixteen, the
polling was wasn't perfect, but it wasn't as bad as
the analysis.
Speaker 1: Does it have something to do with I'm just going
to ask you this straight out, and I imagine you
may be diplomatic about this, but about the dishonesty of
what I like to call the accomplice media we have
seen over the last several years in this country. They're
more interested in creating a narrative than telling the story.
How much did I don't know if it was willful Ultimately,
I think in some regards it definitely was, or just
you know, ignorance that again they just couldn't possibly imagine
that Donald Trump could defeat this, you know, this gilded
politician and so called stateswomen and Hillary Clinton. How much
of that played into where the polls were and the
reporting in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2: If you're being generous, you point out that all of
us live in our bubbles. We tend to see things
breaking in our direction. You know, if you're a fan
of Donald Trump today and you look at how people
are concerned about inflation, you instantly say, well, it's still
Biden's economy and Trump is going to fix it. If
you're a Trump opponent, you're going to say, well, inflation
is a problem today. Trump hasn't done anything about it yet,
and it's going to be the end of him next year.
So part of it is the expectations that we bring
into it. One of the things, one of the fun
facts I like to point out is the polling was
actually much worse in twenty twelve than it was in
twenty sixteen. For the reason nobody knows noticed it then,
is because the expectation was that Barack Obama was going
to win the election. He still won, but by a
much smaller margin than was expected by many of the pundits,
So it wasn't really a shock to the system. And
I think that's a big part of it. You know
right now, Well, you mentioned Hillary Clinton in twenty sixteen,
Barack Obama said she's the most prepared candidate ever to
serve as president. There was a value in her experience
in what we would call the swamp. Voters didn't share that. Today,
we're seeing the same thing. You know, CBS is running
these stories about these poor, honorable civil servants who are
being laid off. Part of the reason for that is
that people in DC, and especially at elite levels in
the political world, believe that working for the government is
more honorable than working in a private sector. So they
don't shed a tear when a steel worker is laid
off the boy government workers get laid off. It's a problem,
and part of it is what you see around us.
Were you to pull a couple of days ago, and
only eight percent of voters say they've really felt any
kind of impact from all of these layoffs. We're doing
a survey in the DC area right now, and the
reaction is much different.
Speaker 1: And I want to get into that in just a moment,
because it's fascinating to see those numbers, but then also
see how the issue is covered by the so called
legacy or mainstream media. Just a note on qualified or
overly qualified candidates for president. Let us never forget what
history has taught us. James Buchanan was arguably the most
qualified candidate for president this country may have ever produced,
and we know how that story ended. I want to Scott,
I want to get to a point that you raised.
I think it's absolutely fascinating because it really gets to
the heart of where Americans have been for such a
long time, where they are today in terms of sentiment.
You mentioned the whole NATO commitment idea back in all
the way going back into the nineteen eighties, that still
prevails today. And ultimately, Donald Trump has tapped into so
many of these issues that are so important to the
average voter, but so dismissed by the elites, so dismissed
by the again the accomplice media. Why is it that
he seems to be in so many cases the only
guy who is recognizing these things that the usual suspects
put to the side.
Speaker 2: You know, you could say that Donald Trump has good
gut instincts that he's been talking about this or thinking
about it in different ways for a long time. People
on the left have a hard time understanding how this
billionaire can seem to connect with working class Americans better
than others. But I think there's a couple of things
going on. Number One, progressives have a theory of the world,
and the theory of the world is Their theory of
the world is experts know what's best, and if you
just turn over government to the experts, it will be
better for the working class, it'll be better for lower
income Americans. And what that means is they really don't
listen very much to the people. They don't share the concerns.
We saw this in the campaign last year. The message
coming out of the Biden White House was the economy
is doing great. You people are just too stupid to
recognize it. Not a great message, not a great message
at all. So there's this sense of they don't understand
the importance of listening. They don't understand the importance of
the fact that when voters raise these concerns they want
them addressed. So immigration is an issue that for decades,
more than eighty percent of Americans have said legal immigration
is good for America. More than eighty percent have said
illegal immigration is bad for America. We did a survey
last year of the elite one percent. We asked a
thousand members of this elite world, in their own words,
what was the most important issue facing the nation. Not
one of them mentioned immigration or border security. They weren't
listening to what was going on. When we asked federal
government managers in December about the biggest issue facing the nation,
very few mentioned the economy because, you know, in the
federal government, at least until Elon Muskin Dooge, the economy
was great. If you worked for the federal government job
for life, you are pretty well paid. And so they
just didn't understand what was going on in the country.
And I will come back, you know. I think we
are all products of the bubbles that we live in.
I think a lot of it is tied to the
fact that these people are living in a different world.
During the pandemic, economists were shocked and how fast jobs
came back after that initial surge of layoffs well, the
reason that they were shocked by it is because everybody
in their world was afraid to go out and they
could stay at home and work on their computer. They
didn't understand how bartenders and waitresses and construction workers needed
to go on the job and begin to earn some money.
So this disconnect is real, and one of the challenges
we have as a nation is how do we begin
to bridge that gap. The legacy media did a horrible job.
They became part of the elite bubble. They refused to
acknowledge anything else. And what we saw in twenty twenty
four is the legacy meetia is no longer relevant.
Speaker 1: That is the big takeaway I think absolutely right from
the twenty twenty four and I believe wasn't it there
you know an unnamed, anonymous corporate media executive who said,
if Donald Trump wins, we're over. We're done. I mean,
that's not his exact quote, but that's that's the sentiment.
And there is something to be said about sentiment and
totally understanding it. Obviously, Abraham Lincoln understood it very well.
His famous line, of course, is, you know, public sentiment
is everything. With it, you can accomplish just about anything.
Without it, you can accomplish nothing. I still see in
early twenty twenty five, in the first couple of months
of the Trump's second term in office, the twenty first
centuries Grover Cleveland, I still see a doubling down from
the left. They have they seen based on what you're
seeing in the numbers, what you've reported in the numbers,
They've learned just about absolutely nothing from the verdict of
the American people in twenty twenty four. Am I correct
or am I overstating that?
Speaker 2: Well, you may be overstating it a little, but I
think broadly speaking, you're correct. You know, it is stunning
to me that so many Democrats refuse to get behind
the idea that biological males should not be allowed to
compete in women's sports. They are doubling down on an
issue that is supported by thirteen percent of voters. Overwhelmingly
people think that's a bad idea. It's a rejection of
common sense. We see the same thing on border security issues.
There is just this unwillingness among progressives to think that's
an important issue. In fact, some of them go so
far as to say it's unethical to think about having borders.
So why they're so far out of touch. I don't know.
One of my favorite commentators on this he now works
at AEI. He is a long term moderate Democrat. Really,
to Shaa, who writes a blog The Liberal Patriot, you
should look at that every day. He really began his
new evaluation of the Democratic Party a couple of years
ago with a column called the Democrats common Sense Problem,
and he listed ten issues where they were eighty twenty issues,
and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party was on
the twenty side and just purging anybody who didn't agree
with them. And it's going to take a little while
before that comes un done. I would say that if
the Republicans, if the economy does come back a little bit,
and the Republicans can hang onto the House in twenty
twenty six, you're going to start to see some movement
from the Democrats, because all of a sudden they'll be
looking at a long time out of power if they
don't adjust. If something happens then Democrats gain control of
the House and do pretty well on the state races,
they may stick to their doubling down approach for a
little while longer.
Speaker 3: New York State has a new recruitment process for Democrat voters.
Speaker 4: The watch Dout on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski.
Every day Chris helps unpack the connection between politics and
the economy and how it affects your wallet.
Speaker 3: After DOJ's purge of the federal workforce, Governor Kathy Hochel
is recruiting federal workers to move to New York. Does
she really want employment or just more votes?
Speaker 4: Whether it's happening in DC or down on Wall Street,
it's affecting you financially. Be informed. Check out the watch
Doot on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: In interesting eighteen months on that front, for sure, our
guess our guest today is renowned polster Scott Rasmussen, President
of our MG Research Incorporated. As we check in on
the pulse of America at the dawn of Trump two
point zero. So let's take a look at some of
those numbers on the key issues Doge. I think we've
got to begin at the Department of Government efficiency. There's
a lot of hair on fire in the swamp these days,
for sure. How is it truly resonating with the American voter?
Speaker 2: Right Now, if you talk about DOGE, it's important to
remember that those of us who live in the political
world and talk politics all the time often speak a
different language than everyday Americans. So in December, when DOGE
was getting up and running, only nineteen percent of voters
even knew what it was. As of a week ago,
only thirty five percent actually know what DOGE is all about.
So we want to be careful about the terminology. When
you talk about the project, people are generally happy with it.
People approve of the cuts. Forty eight percent say that
reducing the number of federal employees is good for the economy,
forty one percent say it's bad. Only about a third
thinks that things have gone too far in terms of layoffs.
Right now, most are saying now, we're not there yet.
And at the core of it all is the belief
that there's not just waste in the federal government, which
people certainly assume and they're happy to see some of
it being cleaned up. There's also a belief that there's
a tremendous amount of corruption, and we look at some
of the projects like the USAID programs, and that just
reinforces the attitude. So as long as those things are
being talked about, and you're cutting at some of the
federal bureaucracy, cutting at some of that corruption, it's very positive.
My one concern about the way people are talking about
it on the Republican and conservative side of the aisle
is they're talking about it as a way, we're doing
this so we can balance the budget. That's not going
to happen. There are a number of factors that are
driving the growth of federal spending, and no matter if
you eliminate every henny of waste and corruption and fraud
and abuse, spending will continue to go up, sure at
a slower rate. But that's a different question. So right now,
it's just cleaning up a mess, which is very well received. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's the horrifying part about the reality of our national
debt is that it is so monstrous, It is so
huge that even the best of intentions, of course in
right sizing the government cleaning up waste is a small
drop in the bucket ultimately to what we need to
accomplish on that front. What about the economy, Old James
Carville once said it, as I understand it, many many
years ago, it's the economy stupid. It remained the economy
stupid in a lot of different elections. It certainly was
in twenty twenty four, and you saw a lot of
people on the left not reading the tea leaves on
that front, and I think it ultimately cost them. That
was Still the number one issue is how is all
of that resonating in the first several weeks of the
Trump administration. I know Democrats have done everything they can
to blame the price of eggs on Donald Trump. Is
that resonating their arguments?
Speaker 2: First of all? To that question, though it's not resonating
people still, we ask them which party do you trust
to deal with the problem of inflation. They trust Republicans
by a forty five percent to thirty four percent margin,
so a double digit edge to the Republicans. There is.
Inflation is a huge concern to voters, and if it
is not a dreat, it's going to be a problem
in the mid terms. Right now, though voters are saying
this is Biden's economy, you know, it's going to take
the new guy a little bit of time to address this.
A year from today, I would guess that Donald Trump
will be fully responsible for whatever happens, good or bad
with inflation in the broader sense of the economy, we
track on a regular basis. Every other week we do
a survey to ask how people are feeling about the economy,
and our favorite measure is are your personal finances getting
better or worse? Because that's really what drives your political
reaction to the economy. Starting on November fifth, we saw
a dramatic reduction in pessimism about the economy. Every time
we did a survey it got less pessimistic. So on
election day or just before election day, forty one one
percent of voters said their finances were getting worse, and
by the time we got to the end of January
it was down the twenty nine percent. So just having
Trump win the election gave people a sense of hope.
In the last few weeks, we've seen that reverse a
little bit. There's a lot of confusion about the tariff
issue and a lot of ups and downs about that.
So we're not seeing things go back to as bad
as they were last October in terms of perceptions about
the economy, But there are some warning signs, some yellow
lights that the Trump administration is going to have to
address this head on.
Speaker 1: Let me ask you this then, and maybe it is
the tariffs. I've seen a lot of numbers on that
and reporting on that. Confusion I think is the seems
to be the main theme coming out of it. What
is the biggest issue that President Trump is so far,
at least with the American people not getting right or
not connecting with the American people on.
Speaker 2: Well. When he was elected, I said there were three
issues that voters were expecting him to deal with. Number
one was border security. I mean, from the first time
he wrote down that escalator, Donald Trump's signature issue has
been securing the border. He clearly addressed that with a
lot of executive orders and some other actions and very
high profile deportation efforts, and the change has been dramatic.
When Joe Biden was in office, only twenty four percent
of voters thought the federal government was serious about securing
the border. It's up to sixty nine percent today. So
that was one issue. Second issue was what I might
term is a return to normalcy or what a president
would call a common sense revolution around the topic of
gender identity. And again he addressed that with some early
actions executive orders against boys playing in girls' sports, executive
orders about there are only two genders. It's not something
you're assigned at birth. You are either a male or
a female. And so those things he has addressed and
I think has gone very very well. The third issue
is the economy, and it takes a lot of forms,
and there's a lot of concerns. Inflation is a big
part of it. But that's the issue that he really
has to focus on. You can talk about cutting government
spending and people are encouraged by that, but they'd rather
have a strong economy than a cleaned up government. And
so if I was advising the president, that's what I
would be saying between now and November twenty twenty six.
You have to make the economy work for all Americans.
Speaker 1: This election, this last election was in no small part
about elections, election security, election integrity. You've done a lot
of work on that front. In fact, wasn't just a
few days ago you talked about the notion of election integrity,
how important that is to the American voter. One note
here you have is more than eighty five percent of
voters support five basic election reforms as it relates to
election integrity. Where what are those five tenants? Where do
people stand on them?
Speaker 2: These are common sense reforms. But I think it's important
to step back and look at why this is so important.
Only forty five percent of voters, so fewer than half
of all voters say they are very confident that their
votes are accurately counted and the correct person declared the winner.
Fewer than half of Americans have that confidence. In a
nation where the government derives it's only just authority from
the consent of the governed, that's a crisis. And it's
not just Republicans or just Democrats who have that view.
The number is virtually identical between the parties. If you
go back to twenty twenty. Of course, Republicans think the
election was stolen. If you go back to twenty sixteen,
Democrats think the election was stolen. So there is a
complete lack of confidence in our electoral system. The basic
reforms that people embrace our photo ID requirements for everybody
who votes citizens proof of citizenship to register as part
of the voting process, accounting things like making sure that
the number of ballots submitted equals the total number of
votes that are reported. You know we are talking about.
These are not minor technical details. These are just sort
of why wouldn't you do this if people believe that
all ballots should be submitted by election day, because if
you've mail them in, well that's fine, but get them
in by election day. Why is that important? Well, you
know when your team loses the Super Bowl, you don't
get to play an extra quarter to try and score
another touchdown. People have that sense, so they want to
see these reforms. And it's really important to note this
is not a partisan effort. This is not Trump people
who are upset about twenty twenty or some other group
that is complaining about a particular election. This is a
broad concern that we need to have confidence in our
electoral processes. And it's something that it is hard to
talk about because when one party brings it up when
they're losing, it's obviously their motives are challenged. But it
is something that we're going to be seen talked about
a lot in the coming years because people want this
country to work and they want the election process to
be something they can believe.
Speaker 1: In no doubt about that. It's amazing to me as
an elections correspondent here at the Federalist and covering elections
and some truly questionable elections in my time, particularly in
swing state Wisconsin. It's amazing to me the resistance that
continues against where Americans really are on election reform, common
sense election integrity reforms. Is it Is it similar that resistance?
Is it similar to what you were talking to before,
the bubble notion of some of these folks.
Speaker 2: I'm sure that's a part of it, and I'm sure
a big part of it comes to do with the
rhetoric that has been put out. You know, when the
Democrats took over a Congress few years back, they tried
to push through something called the For the People Act,
which was an absolutely horrific piece of election legislation, but
they produced all kinds of polls showing that seventy or
seventy five percent of voters supported it. So we went
out and did the exact same type of questions, and
we found seventy or seventy percent supported that act when
you described it in general terms, And then we asked
all those who liked it what they thought it included.
The big tell, the big story from that was most
of the people who said they liked that reform thought
it mandated photo ID requirements for all elections. In fact,
it banned photo ID requirements. When we went back in
the field and gave that information to people, fell from
the seventy percent range to in the twenties because people
thought that was a basic reform. But what's happened is
there's groups like the Brennan Center that have adopted this
terminology of voter suppression, and they were keenly putting out
The Republican legislatures introduced three hundred and twelve voter suppression
measures last year. If you look at what most of
them are, they are things like photo ID requirements. They
are things like citizenship requirements, and it just amazes me
that they're not able. To get out of that bubble
would be four the People Act. I believe the Democrats
could have passed that and could have had it be
successful if they had only dropped the ban on photo
ID requirements. That was the big silver bullet that hurt it,
but they were unwilling to do so.
Speaker 1: You've been very generous of your time and I very
much appreciate it. You are an extremely busy gentlemen. You
have been for a long time editor at large at
Ballot PD. I love the number of the day. I
look at that on a regular basis. There's one up
as we record today about FDR and Vetos, which I
particularly enjoyed as a history buff. But I do want
to finish out our conversation with I don't think a
lot of people know they know Scott Rasmussen, you know,
the renowned polster. They don't know that this is the
guy who with his father many years ago, started a
little network, little sporting network called ESPN. I do have
to ask you much has changed since the early days
when I used to tune in and watch the Strongest
Man competition or for it was the programming, you know,
the very interesting sporting programming that you would have there
in the early days. You didn't have the big contracts
of course for a lot of these major events. Much
has changed since then. What do you think of the
ESPN today?
Speaker 2: You know, it's funny when I think of ESPN, I
think of the early days. I think of before we
went on the air and all the challenges, and it's
such a phenomenal memory. And I remember in our earliest
days on the air, we showed something called Irish Hurling,
which we aired because we got free tapes.
Speaker 1: Yeah I love it, and this is.
Speaker 2: Pre internet obviously, and we started getting swamped with calls
about what are the leagues and how can we follow it?
And it just brought us off guard with how much
the demand for this was and as for it, we
had awareness. I've been uninvolved for a very long time,
and so it's just another sports outlet to me because
it's not the place that I remember. ESPN is involved.
They're doing a documentary on the founding days. I don't
know when they plan to release it, but I did
an interview for a week or two ago and it
brought up a lot of fun memories from the early days,
and that's where I will always cherish no very good now.
Speaker 1: It is true. It is definitely not the network that
you and your father started, and we'll just leave it
at that. Whish we had more time, we could talk
for a good, good long time about all of the
issues of the day. But I do appreciate you taking
some time for a little perspective on the early days
of Trump two point zero in particular.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you, and I have a great day.
Speaker 1: Absolutely thanks to my guest today, renowned polster Scott Rasmus,
and you've been listening to another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittles, senior Elections correspondent at The Federalist.
We'll be back soon with more. Until then, stay lovers
of freedom and anxious for the fray.