Rasmussen Informs (CONT’D FROM PAGE 1)
or speeches, it’s events happening in the real world. Ras- mussen confessed that he is an optimist, mainly because he looks at more data about what the American people think than just about anybody else and not just about pol- itics; he analyzes data about their culture, about their life, about what they’re seeing, and about their attitudes. “The bottom line is that Americans overwhelmingly continue to believe in the founding ideals of freedom, equality and self-governance, and they continue to broadly embrace what I might call Judeo-Christian values,” he said. Fundamental Assumptions In looking to the future, Rasmussen said he needed to share the most important business lesson he learned from his past. He explained how back in the 1970s, the world of sports on television was simply terrible. There was only one college football game on every weekend. There was no such thing as March Madness. There was no talk of col-
ber,” he said as he began his presentation. “I realize that if I don’t answer that right up front, you won’t listen to any- thing else I’m going to say so I’ll get that out of the way.” He paused for effect. “If the election was held today, Don- ald Trump would win, the Republicans would control the Senate and they would probably control the House with a little safer margin than they have today. But as many of you may be aware, the election is not being held today, it’s be- ing held in November. And if you want me to tell you who’s going to win in November, then tell me what the world will be like in November.” Rasmussen conceded that polling indicates the election is indeed close; Republicans think they’re winning, Demo- crats think it’s winnable for them but what’s really going to shape the election is not brilliant campaign strategies
lege women’s sports or women’s sports at all, and most Major League baseball teams couldn’t even get their games televised. “The reason that the new satellite broadcasting technology was so signifi- cant was that we were able to send a sig- nal out from any event to all of America via satellite for less money than it cost to send the same signal around the state of Con- necticut via traditional landline,” he said. “We were excited about this. Imagine, we had the idea for all sports, all day, ev- ery day and we were convinced that if we share shared it with anybody, they would steal the idea from us. We went to eight different broadcast companies and every one of them laughed us out of the room and said our idea would never work.” Then the Rasmussens went to Getty Oil to pitch their idea, after which the multina- tional conglomerate made a $100 million commitment on an industry that did not yet exist. For perspective, understand that the fledgling HBO was in only 400,000 house- holds for eight hours a day. “Getty exec- utives asked me about my projections for 1988 and because I was young and good with numbers, I gave a totally precise but utterly worthless answer,” Rasmussen said. “Getty’s people also didn’t have an idea of what the revenue would be in 1988 than we did, so what we needed to look at were fundamental assumptions.” The fundamentals came down to whether or not cable television companies would accept this kind of sports program- ming the Rasmussens were proposing. At the time, most cable systems only had six or 12 channels so it wasn’t necessarily
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