Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich ably defined, in a syndicated column on Monday, the findings that pollster Scott Rasmussen had uncovered in several surveys but distilled earlier this month: There’s a group of Americans out there who must be marginalized if this country is going to survive. Gingrich wrote:

While doing their two weekly national surveys, Rasmussen and his team noticed an anomaly. Out of every 1,000 or so respondents, there would always be three or four who were far more radical than everyone else. After several months of finding these unusual responses, Rasmussen realized they all shared three characteristics.

The radical responses came from people who had graduate degrees (not just graduate studies), family incomes above $150,000 a year, and lived in large cities (more than 10,000 people per zip code).

When Rasmussen aggregated the responses from more than 20 surveys, he realized these people made up a unique elite 1 percent.

He then did a national survey of only people with these characteristics — and found some astonishing results. He briefed me and our team on the findings — and joined me on Newt’s World to talk about it further.

You know exactly who Gingrich and Rasmussen are talking about here. And here’s how these people are further defined, none of which is surprising:

• Two-thirds of them are between 35 and 54;
• 86 percent are white;
• 73 percent are Democrats;
• Just under half (47 percent) favor Bernie Sanders– style socialism;
• The same number, 47 percent, say there is “too much freedom” in America;
• 35 percent say they’d “rather cheat than lose a close election.” That number doubles among the ones who say they’re active in politics daily;
• 71 percent have a favorable opinion of the legacy media;
• 74 percent of them say they’re actually better off financially than they were before COVID (only 20 percent of the rest of us say so);
• Tellingly, 76 percent have a favorable opinion of college professors (The rest of the country? Just 17 percent hold that opinion);
• Two-thirds, or 67 percent, say teachers and other educational professionals should decide what children are
  taught rather than letting parents do so;
• 77 percent would “impose strict restrictions and rationing on the private use of gas, meat, and electricity”;
• 72 percent would ban gas-powered vehicles;
• 69 percent would ban gas stoves;
• 58 percent would ban SUVs;
• 55 percent would ban non-essential air travel;
• 53 percent would ban private air conditioning; and
• Joe Biden has an 84 percent approval rating with this crowd.

In other words, these are monsters who would plunge their fellow Americans into Third World tyranny and poverty and impose an unbearably low quality of life on the rest of us.

And a great many of them hold degrees from elite universities — the Ivy League, MIT, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago.

Thankfully, most of these opinions are not shared by the bulk of the populace. They’re the types of positions that will get a political party utterly trounced in major elections — assuming the other party (1) wants to win and (2) is willing to make elections into referenda on the worldview expressed above.

Of course, we’re stuck with a Republican Party that has yet to learn how to throw Democrat politicians up against a wall and force them to either repudiate this “elite 1 percent” of Rasmussen’s definition or suffer the wrath of the rest of the country.

It isn’t that hard to do. Make a congressional race in the suburbs of, say, Chicago or Denver a fight over gas stoves or water heaters and force your opponent to admit those suggested bans are crazy talk, and his money and support from soyboys and AWFLs will suffer. Make him defend those things and he’s going to have trouble with — among many others — Asians, Hispanics, and a big chunk of black men (though, as of right now, it doesn’t appear there is any fall-off from the Democrats with black women, for whatever reason).

Rasmussen’s 1 percent track with all the zany things spun out to the population at Davos and other globalist elite confabs. Because, of course, they do; they’ve been indoctrinated into the globalist/socialist/anti-American mindset.

The universities certainly contributed to that, and these people define themselves to a disproportionate extent by those college degrees — credentials that afford them white-collar positions that generally don’t involve much in the way of tangible knowledge. These people aren’t engineers or construction managers; they don’t run farms or factory floors. Most of what they do involves staring at computer screens and massaging keyboards (yes, dear reader, your author is quite aware of the irony of my describing these people in such terms), and, most importantly, that work disproportionately does not involve an intimate relationship with objective reality. The jobs the elite Rasmussen describes involve, at least to a disproportionate extent, the ability to creatively imagine that two plus two equals five.

But what brought this magical-thinking mindset into vogue in America, what made these people into a mainstream political constituency, was the event of Barack Obama.

And, yes, I provide great detail and context about this subject in my latest book Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama, which you are certainly invited to find and purchase at Amazon and other places where books are sold.

Before 2008, there had never been a successful effort to marry the pieties and fetishes of the moneyed elite with a mass popular appeal. Previous efforts at doing so — for example, the failed presidential campaigns of George McGovern, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry — had been miserable failures.

But when Obama came along, he fused the radical chic of the rich white leftist in a Che Guevara T-shirt with the aspirational upward mobility of immigrants and minorities; the latter solely due to the identity politics that Team Obama has weaponized beyond any limits reason and critical thinking might otherwise have imposed. All of a sudden, the insane proclivities described above in Rasmussen’s polling represented the demands of an entire political party — most of whose voters either disagree with or are not motivated by them. Who in the black community, for example, who isn’t a committed Democrat activist is a staunch supporter of banning SUVs or gas stoves?

They didn’t vote for those things. They voted for Obama because he was going to be the first black president. And once in office, they were emotionally committed to his success regardless of his radicalism and resulting failure.

But Obama is gone, at least from a public-facing perspective. It’s Joe Biden who represents the policies of Rasmussen’s radical elite to an electorate no longer bound by a cult of personality.

And that’s why it’s not working anymore.

A poll in New Mexico, which is Ground Zero for the Obama–Biden border invasion — there’s another policy that Rasmussen didn’t poll but would no doubt reveal a massive disconnect between the elite 1 percent and the rest of the country — that popped out this week now has Donald Trump blowing Biden out by a 57–41 margin, with 63 percent of Hispanics rating the current president unfavorable. The RealClearPolitics average of Biden’s approval now sits at 40.1 percent, which is actually up a tick from last week’s 39.8 thanks to two slightly better polls.

You can’t sell the politics of the white radical elite without marrying them to identity politics to attract support from more conservative black, Hispanic, and Asian voters.

And that’s why you’re now seeing this:

Megyn Kelly talks about Cindy Adams from the New York Post was reporting that there is a Plan to replace Joe Biden with Michelle Obama.

It only make sense that Joe Biden will be replace because they know he can’t win! Anyone is more popular than Joe Biden, but make no mistake,… pic.twitter.com/dv28swxUhF

— ꪻꫝể ꪻꫝể (@TheThe1776) January 29, 2024

I’m not here to tell you that Cindy Adams is correct that Michelle Obama will be parachuted into the Democrat Party’s nomination to replace Biden. The word has always been that Michelle didn’t want the job and can’t be told what to do; that would seem to be a major obstacle to making this plan work.

But numbers like Rasmussen has shown us, and the current fortunes of a regime now fronted by an unimpressive white member of our unimpressive political elite, indicate that without such a move, the coalition will collapse.

Because that 1 percent isn’t sellable. Their policies and catechisms increasingly offend the rest of America. And without a shiny object or immense aid offered by Stupid Party Republicans, their reckoning will come.