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I heart Radio. Welcome to Nurture World podcast on the iHeart podcast network. You know, it's very interesting. I've been doing a lot of research on artificial intelligence, including a remarkable new book called Genesis that Henry Kissinger was the lead writer on. And Pope Leo brought out an encyclical on artificial intelligence. It's about 42,000 words. It's entitled Magnifica Humanitis on Safeguarding the Human Person in the time of Artificial Intelligence. I actually think that's a very smart title because the fact is we don't really quite understand what's happening with artificial intelligence. We don't know to what extent it's a danger, to what extent it's an asset, and to what extent. In the long run it's not all that big a deal. We just literally don't know. Now interestingly, the Pope brought in, among others, Christopher Hola, who at 33 is the billionaire co founder of the top artificial intelligence company Anthropic. The Pope was turned into some pretty sophisticated people in a parallel development in science. And this is one of those things that I'm always fascinated by. SpaceX continues to develop the most powerful rocket in history called the Starship. This was their 12th test flight of starship. And it's a new version known as the version three. And these are tests, they're not designed necessarily to work, they're designed to stress different aspects of the starship capabilities. In this case, if you believe SpaceX, and I'm inclined to it did everything right until at the very, very end, when it already come back down, it set off this very large fireball which led people to say, oh, it must be failure. Well, I think Jared Isaacman, who I'm very fond of, who is the NASA administrator, congratulated SpaceX and Elon Musk. This is what Jared said. He's very knowledgeable, brilliant guy. One step closer to the moon, one step closer to Mars. You'll hear me talk a lot more about starship because it is going to be so big, going to be totally reusable. It's going to reduce the price of launching into space probably by another 90%. The original program of SpaceX has already reduced the cost by about 90%. So it's really quite remarkable. Coming up, I'm joined by Scott Rasmussen, President of RMG Research and we're going to talk about his terrific new book, out of touch. The elite 1% and the battle for America's Soul.
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Iheartradio. I'm really pleased to welcome back my guest and good friend Scott Rasmussen. He is the president of RMG Research, founder of Rasmussen Reports, co founder of ESPN and a New York Times best selling author. As you can tell, he's been a very busy guy. His new book out of the elite 1% and the battle for America's Soul is out now and I can tell you it's an amazing book. Scott, welcome. Thank you for joining me again on Newts World.
D
That's always a pleasure to be with you and I'm especially happy to talk about the themes of this new book.
C
This book grew out of your multi year we the People partnership with jigsaw tied to America's 250th birthday. What was the goal of that project from the very beginning?
D
Well, the we the People project was a national conversation with five people from every congressional district in America. And I didn't want to do, you know, another poll where I asked people questions. What do you think about this? We wanted to hear in their own words what they were saying about freedom and Equality heading into our nation's 250th birthday. So the Jigsaw team, which is a tech incubator inside Google, built us a brand new platform, let us get very long form answers to the questions about how they saw freedom and equality. And it was remarkable. We collected 1.6 million words of conversation. That's 10 times the length of the federal those papers. We summarize them and let people know what others thought and then got additional feedback. And ultimately this group of more than 2,000 voters from every congressional district voted on a Declaration of American Ideals. The attitude very much like the declaration written in 1776, but the language is much more than 21st century. And for me, it was reassuring to find out how much common ground there is among the American people.
C
You presented the Declaration of American Ideals at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, which is very close to Independence Hall. Just as a person, how did you feel being at the center of where America grew?
D
You know, it was the most remarkable experience of my life. The Society was founded by Ben Franklin. Thomas Jefferson served as its president for a while. Right across the street from where I made the presentation was the largest collection of original declarations of independence. And there was a moment we gave a history of the project, and then I read the Declaration. And in the midst of reading it, there was a moment when I just paused and looked up and couldn't believe that I was in the middle of this. It was truly an honor.
C
Did you know in advance you'd end up with a declaration?
D
Well, we told people that was our objective right up front, that we wanted to have a conversation. We wanted to hear their thoughts on freedom and equality. What are these founding ideals? Self governance. We told them the objective was going to be to create a declaration, but we also set some ground rules. The biggest one was that for any item to be included in our declaration, it had to be approved by people from representatives of two thirds of the congressional districts. So we didn't want just the red districts or the blue districts having things. We wanted to find areas of consensus. So that was our objective. And we were really pleased to see how it worked out. One of my favorite pieces of data from the project is that going into it, only about 30% of the participants thought they shared common ground with most Americans. And after going through it, that number jumped to over 70%. One of the participants was talking about how much the process got them to think about issues like this. And she thought that it should be required for every elected official to take this survey.
C
Do you have it online in the survey form.
D
Yes, it is online@neapolitannews.org Also, the presentation itself is on at YouTube. So all the information is there, the Declaration is there. And by the way, if you happen to go to Philadelphia this summer and you're walking through the museum because the Philosophical Society is the museum at Independence hall, you will see this Declaration on display there as well. You can find it in many places. But we also put all the background information about it.
C
From your standpoint, did you find the country to be healthier than you expected it to be?
D
You know, I've always been an optimist about America. I've always had confidence that the American people had more common ground than people in the political world like to acknowledge. But this exceeded my expectations. Yes, it was reassuring to see when you read through the comments. I mean, you know what it's like to read a poll and you read the cross tabs and you try and do stuff, but it's a little distant. Well, I actually got to read through these comments. And by the way, all of the comments from all of the participants are available online. There's something reassuring about it. And it was good to see people who said, well, I disagree with others on some specific things, but I did find what we looked for. We could find common ground. So, yes, it was a good feeling coming out of it, especially heading up to our 250th birthday. And it led me to talk about in my book and in other writing that I'm doing that America is not really a 5050 nation. It's a 10-10-80 nation. You know, most Americans don't live and breathe politics. There's 10% on the left who are engaged in a bitter war with 10% on the right. And sometimes they get so consumed fighting each other, they for about representing the 80%. And the 80 percenters really do embrace America's founding ideals. They really do want to move the country forward by raising their family, doing their job, coming up with new businesses, and all the things that we associate with America. And that's a part of the reason I'm still optimistic.
C
But you do point out that even though they may end up with shared beliefs, they don't believe that about the others.
D
One of the saddest bits of polling that I've done, you know, the most terrifying polling I've done has been about the elite 1%. The saddest polling I've done shows that most Republicans don't believe most Democrats love their country, and most Democrats don't believe most Republicans love their country, and both sides think that their team is honorable and trustworthy, and the other side cheats all the time. And the fact is, among voters, that's just not true. In my book, I talk about two Midwestern women. They've known each other more than 50 years. They share common values. They're pretty pragmatic. Life has taken them to different parts of the country. So they end up on different political teams. And the only thing they can't talk about is politics. That's sad that we've reached that point. Only one out of five voters have somebody from the other political team that they can talk to in a rational manner.
C
So from your perspective, how do we break out of that?
D
The book is dedicated to the 519,000 state and local elected officials in America. And one of the things that I suggest is we need to really lift them up. They have two advantages over most people. One, unlike members of Congress, they actually see their constituents on a daily basis. If you're a city council member, you can't go to the grocery store without running into somebody. On the other hand, officials in Washington do stay in touch with their state and local officials. Cory Gardner told me that when he was in the Senate, he would get a summary of calls and letters for everybody else, but he wanted to see every time one of the elected officials in the state would call him. And so I think we need to find ways to not have them ask for Washington to give power back, but to find ways to begin to take power back so decision making is made closer to home. And I think also these people can play a role in lifting up the voice, that common ground they see among their constituents to people in Washington.
C
You make the point that In March of 1965, a majority of Republicans, 57%, approved of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the newly inaugurated Democrat. And four years later, 55% of Democrats approved of Richard Nixon. And then as late as March of 77, 60% of Republicans approved of Democrat Jimmy Carter. And then it seems to collapse. What do you think happened?
D
I put that in because it is so shocking, and I lived through it a little bit younger than you, but I remember those years, and they just seem like in a galaxy far, far away at this point in time, we can't even imagine it. One of the things that happened has been a transition in media, but where I really begin to draw the distinction, and this is, I think, an important factor. Donald Trump did not create this. The polarization that we have today gave the opportunity for Donald Trump and He's the result of it, not the cause of it. It started at a time that you're very familiar with. In 1988, the first president Bush was running for his only term in office. The Republicans had won four of the five preceding elections, three of them by massive landslides. And there was talk, could the Democrats ever win the White House again? And then President Bush was elected with one big campaign promise. Read my lips. No new taxes. He broke that pledge and lost four years later, in 1992. One of the most stunning figures from that 92 election is if you took a look at the working class voters. The share of the vote received by President Bush and Ross Perot combined was exactly the same share that Ronald Reagan had won in the 80s. So all of a sudden, you had a divide, a split in that coalition. In 1994, you addressed that directly with A Contract for America. You had this idea that voters were skeptical about their public officials. You wanted something that people could sign. And ever since then, that distrust. There's that base in the Republican Party that has not trusted Republican officials. They've been fighting with more traditional Republicans. And as that's been going on, people, the polarization just increased. Social media made it much worse. And right now, if I were to tell a Democrat that Republicans believe water is wet, they would argue with me. And the reverse is true as well.
C
Do you think this grew out of the degree to which Bush disillusioned people, or.
D
I think the movement that Donald Trump now leads, he did not create. I believe the movement that he leads was created by people who were disillusioned with President Bush breaking that pledge. They became the base, angry base of the Republican Party. One of the things that you can tell is different is since 1988, we have had 10 presidential elections. We have not had a single landslide. Landslides, as you recall, were very common for most of the 20th century, up until 1972. Then we had the Reagan landslides, and nothing since. In all of those years, there were 1.2 billion votes cast for president. Just under 49% for Democrats, just over 47% for Republicans. I believe that neither party has been able to build a governing coalition to reach out to that centrist group. And both sides have had their chance, and voters are still looking for something. And in that situation, I mean, let's be honest, in 1984, nobody argued that Walter Mondale could have won by changing his messaging or changing, you know, his swing state Strategy. He lost 49 states. That was good for America because it purged any doubts about the election. It gave the President legitimacy. Now, every election, the losing team has reasons to think my candidate blew it. The other side cheated, and that just adds to the polarization. But it grew. It started about 40 years ago.
C
I first ran for office in 1974 in the middle of Watergate. Nixon had just carried 49 states and got 62% of the vote and collapsed. By the spring of 75, Republican identity was down to 17%. And actually the Republican National Committee was actually running a commercial entitled Republicans Are People Too. And you would have thought at that moment that we had no future. As you point out, we come back having won Nixon's huge landslide. We come back and won Reagan's huge landslide, and then we keep the presidency with what I thought was the best race I ever participated in, in 1988, when Dukakis was up by 19 and we beat him by eight, which pushed every fourth voter. But you get the sense right now that we're locked almost like a glacier or something. I mean, you couldn't get the energy and the momentum to have that kind of a swing in an election right now.
D
No, there's no way you could have that energy. You know, it's also interesting, by the way, 1976 was the first election I voted in. And if you look at the Electoral College map, then it doesn't look anything like today's. California and the west coast were all Republican. California was actually a swing state in that year, but it was an east west divide. I like to point that out because coalitions do shift over time, but they do require something different now. In that 1976 election, the big story really was that Jimmy Carter was elected, but after Watergate, the Democrats should have won by much more. He barely squeaked by that. Told you. Democrats were really just an anybody but Nixon movement at that point. I believe the same could be said of Joe Biden's victory in 2020. His victory when millions, tens of millions of people were thrown out of work, should have been much bigger. It wasn't. Somebody has to find a way to communicate to the 80%, to the broader electorate. I think right now, the two political teams are very locked in. They are very poised to counter the other's challenges. But the next president will be younger. Eventually. We need to find a president who can do what Ronald Reagan did and speak a positive message that reinforces America's founding ideals, puts them in context, and begins to break this logjam. It's going to be tough.
C
When we come back, we're going to discuss what Scott calls the elite 1% and why this influential group has a huge influence and why that may explain the divide between voters and Washington.
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I heart Radio. How did you get around to thinking about an elite 1%?
D
Well, you know, I began my polling career in the term limits movement, and I was shocked way back then because term limits was supported by 80% of Americans, by Republicans and Democrats and young and old. And yet political journalists always wrote about it as controversial. I thought that was odd. Since then, over the last four decades, I found lots of issues that have popular support that are written about as controversial or dismissed by people in the political world. I've been searching for explanations. In the early parts of this century, I created a political class inde more recently, though. Look, I see lots of polling data every single day, and I noticed there were three groups that were consistently out of touch with most voters on issues. The three groups were people with a postgraduate degree, people who make a lot of money, and people who live in densely populated urban areas. And the first of those, the postgraduate degree, is worth just commenting on, because you hear a lot in the political world about a diploma divide, and maybe there's some truth to that, but the real divide is between postgraduates and everybody else. People with a bachelor's degree hold views that are closer to those without a degree than they do the postgrads. But my theory was, what if you're a postgraduate and you go to live in Manhattan, you might have different views than if you're a postgrad who goes to live in Cedar Rapids. So I began testing to see if there was something to this. Steve Moore's group, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, sponsored the first full survey I did on this, and the numbers were stunning. Among politically active elites, those elites who are talking politics on a daily basis, they overwhelmingly believe the rest of us have too much individual freedom. They overwhelmingly trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time. Oh, and by the way, they'll do just about anything to fight climate change. They think that banning the Private ownership of guns is not only a good thing, it's supported by most people. I mean, this was a group that was wildly out of touch and they're very influential. So that research started me down this path. It's what led to the book. Chris Ruffo wrote the forward of the book because some of it ties into the work that he's been doing on what happened to our education system since the 1960s. It's an ongoing project. There's a lot to be learned from this. But I do believe ultimately this elite 1% rejects America's founding ideals. Half of them believe you should not be allowed to vote unless you have a college degree. And that's the battle for America's soul. We have, the vast majority of Americans still believe in those founding ideals of freedom, equality and self governance. These elites believe they're destined to rule over the rest of us. And their, I guess, ideological forefather is Woodrow Wilson, a man that I consider the worst president in our nation's history.
C
Explain that for a minute.
D
Well, Woodrow Wilson, first of all, by the way, he's the only president who ever had a PhD. Wilson got his PhD shortly after the Civil War, a time when the American university system was changing. Before the Civil War and up until Wilson's time, universities were effectively theological seminaries. Nine out of 10 college presidents in America were members of the clergy. There was a movement to create a more European style university. That was the world of Wilson. And he openly admired the Prussian system of government. In 1887, he wrote a very influential article called the Study of Administration in which he argued for the creation. He didn't use the term the same way we would today, but he argued for the creation of an administrative state. And during his time in office, he complained that the problem with the American people is they've never gotten over the Declaration of Independence. Wilson just believed that we should have a government run by professionals. He thought the professional's role was to tell people what they should support and that the role of the people was to obey. That was really the ideological underpinnings of the early 20th century Progressive movement and it became a part of the New Deal. When Wilson was president, he acted on it. He arrested people for disagreeing with him. He nationalized the railroads and the phone companies. He had very little respect for what we would consider normal American practice.
C
That then evolved into, I love your title, the Elite 1% and the Battle for America's Soul. In that, the Elite 1% largely derives from the Wilsonian belief that the people are Stupid. But we, the elite, can take care of them.
D
Yes, yes. And throughout the book, I refer to, you know, Wilson's approach as government by the unelected. And yes, that is where Wilson started. It is where the government has gone for a very long time. And there is a belief that voters should listen. In fact, one of the things in our elite 1% research, we asked people, what should a regulator do if they come to a conclusion that something should be done and they know that voters hate it and their answer is, ignore the voters, implement the rule. This is the problem. I should also point out though that it really took hold in a big way during that time. We were talking about earlier, from the late 19th century up until the 1950s, the university world, this elite world, still saw America as a good nation. In the 60s, and especially starting in about 1965, there was a movement in the elite world to cast America as an oppressor nation. Aaron Woldofsky talked a lot about these problems. He saw it 50 years before it fully blossomed. But all of a sudden you had our university system which was passing on our ideals and our norms, promoting this idea that America is the problem, not the solution. So you add that to the Wilsonian worldview and you have where we are today.
C
It's amazing. And I think the work you've done literally is groundbreaking. I mean, I think you pulled together a clear understanding of what they honestly, legitimately believe. I think they're crazy. But when you look at it, they are very sincere and how much they're elitists. Coming up, we discuss America's future. Can we restore self government by shifting power back to state and local communities?
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Iheartradio. How do we in fact migrate America back towards a more self governing country? I mean, how would you do that?
D
You know, first thing you have to do is convince people that it's possible. I believe Ronald Reagan's greatest contribution coming out of the Carter era was giving people hope. And so we need to start doing that. We need to lift up the fact that we share a lot of common ground. And that's what I want to be doing with the we the People project and the Declaration of American Ideals. The second thing, and you just said a key word. How do you migrate back to that? People right now are looking for one person to come in and declare a decisive victory over the other political team and the world will all be perfect again. That's not the way reality works. We need to do something that I call radical incrementalism, which is making small changes in your daily practices that lead to larger changes. The idea is reflected in a horrible story of James Garfield's assassination. But he was a 49 year old, healthy president, got shot by an assassin on July 2, but the bullet didn't kill him. His doctors did because they didn't believe in the new theories of sterilization. So they had a dozen different doctors reach inside his body trying to find the bullet without washing their hands first. What came out of that for America was a new medical practice. Doctors and nurses would wash their hands before every procedure, before interacting with a patient. Sounds pretty small, but life expectancy in America went from the mid-40s, when that happened, to just over 60 years old. Within a couple of decades, a small change brought about something big. I think one of the things that we need to ask about every single policy before we get into a debate about what the policy should be is to ask the question, who decides? Is this something that should be decided at the federal level, state, local level by the individual, family or community? The minute you begin to get into that discussion, you change the debate. Great example right now is Paul's show that most Americans think we should ban cell phones from schools. Turns out, though, most parents want their kids to have a cell phone in school. So who should decide that? The parents whose kids are going to the schools. It's something the federal government should decide. When you begin to ask people about it, they want decision making close to home. Lots of examples about how to do that. I talk about a lot of them in my book. And very specifically, there are actions that state and local officials can take to raise that question and really slow down the federal takeover of the regulatory state.
C
Yeah, it's been fascinating and I think it explained a lot of the rise of Trump, that if you go all the way back to a great small book written about 1869, I think, called Plunkett of Tammany Hall. Plunkett was a senior member of the Tammany Machine and he is talking to a New York Times reporter and trying to explain how the machine worked and why it was actually superior to the civil service because it actually had to pay attention to the voters. And when you read it at the time, it sounded very strange, but when you look at what's happened with the bureaucratic state, you read things like Anthony Day's two amazing books on TV series called yes Minister and yes Prime Minister. And you realize even a guy like Trump who has a huge willpower is up against a giant machine. You know, Lincoln had five people on the White House staff. He fought the entire Civil War with five people.
D
Wildly different dynamic. You know, I trace all of that and really I think I trace what makes America such a unique and innovative nation all the way back to 1636, when the colonists decided they wanted to start a college in the Boston area because they wanted to create a city on a hill. There was one problem they had. Under English law In the 17th century, you were not allowed to start any organization without permission from the king. And the king would have given them permission to start a college if they taught the Anglican theology that they had gone across the Atlantic to run away from. So what they did was innovate. They started a college without asking permission. They got a little bit lucky because the English Civil War intervened and the king lost his head. But all of a sudden, Americans began to realize that, well, if we can start a college without permission, we can start a library without permission, we can start a business without permission. And 140 years later, they said we can create a continental Congress without permission. That idea of being free to pursue your own ideas, not having to ask government for permission for everything, is what set America apart from the mother country. It eventually created enough tension that it led to the war for independence and set America on a path to still be what I consider the last best hope for mankind.
C
Scott, I want to thank you for joining me. Your new book, out of touch, the elite 1% and the battle for America's Soul is available now on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere. And I want to let our listeners know they can follow the work you do by visiting your website@rmgresearch.com thank you.
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And now I'm pleased to introduce a new segment to Newt's World where I answer listeners questions. To ask a question please email me@ Newt Gingrich360.com Benjamin R. Ask you identified bringing down gasoline prices as the number one component of Republican victory in 2026. Do you think the President will be able to achieve this even if the conflict with Iran is not completely resolved? Are there other actions he could take to help lower gas prices? I believe you have to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. You have to move oil out of the Persian Gulf. And if you don't do that, nothing else has a big enough impact to matter. So they have to find whether it's by military force, by negotiation. I don't know how they do it, but they have to, I think certainly no later than the 1st of September, have a very substantial increase in the flow of oil and therefore a substantial decline in the price of gasoline. I look forward to hearing from you. To ask a question, please email me@newtinger360.com thank you to my guest Scott Rasmussen. Newtsworld is produced by Gingrich360 and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Garnesy Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. Special thanks to the team at Gingrich360. If you've been enjoying Newts World, 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. Join me on substack@gingrich360.net I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newt's World.
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Host: Newt Gingrich
Guest: Scott Rasmussen (President of RMG Research, founder of Rasmussen Reports, co-founder of ESPN, author of "Out of Touch: The Elite 1% and the Battle for America’s Soul")
Date: May 29, 2026
In this episode, Newt Gingrich welcomes pollster and author Scott Rasmussen for an in-depth conversation surrounding his recent book, “Out of Touch: The Elite 1% and the Battle for America’s Soul.” They discuss the fragmentation of American politics, the rise of an isolated elite, the health of American civic life ahead of the nation's 250th birthday, and how restoring self-governance at local levels can bridge today’s divides. The discussion draws on extensive research, historical context, and personal anecdotes to both diagnose and find hope for the state of American democracy.
Timestamps: 05:10 – 09:18
Timestamps: 09:25 – 12:14
Timestamps: 13:23 – 20:47
Timestamps: 21:30 – 28:32
Timestamps: 29:26 – 35:11
Scott Rasmussen’s work pushes back against the dominant narrative of intractable division by uncovering consensus beneath the noise. He and Newt Gingrich argue that America’s future depends on reviving the founding spirit of self-governance, shifting power and trust back to local actors, and remembering the deep-seated pluralism and decency that still define the majority of Americans.
For more from Scott Rasmussen:
Book: “Out of Touch”
Website: rmgresearch.com