RUSH: Some electoral news that dovetails with the Obama decision. It’s a prediction, actually (and I don’t doubt it), that they’re gonna announce an additional three-year delay and allow you to keep your plan that you liked, that you were lied to about. You were told 24 different times over three years by the president you could keep it if you liked it, and then they took it away from you.
And then they gave it back to you when they found out how much you liked it because there was an election coming up — and they extended your illegal plan that you liked that you were promised you could keep until this year. Then they realized that the cancellation notice that would go out telling you that this year was gonna be it, would be 90 days before the cancellation date. That’s the law.
That would mean people would get cancellation notices in the two weeks leading up to the November elections. The Regime said, “That’ll kill us. If people get notices two weeks before they go vote in the midterms that their plans cancelled again.” So they’re just are gonna extend it three years, even beyond the 2016 elections. But that alone is not going to solve a lot of problems they’ve got president from the Washington Post again today. This is a piece by Dan Balz and Scott Clement.
They’ve got a poll they’re reporting on here.
It’s a Washington Post/ABC News poll. They are frustrated, these two guys, because headline says it all: “Poll: Democrats’ Advantage on Key Issues Is Not Translating to a Midterm Election Advantage — The American people trust Democrats more than Republicans on some of the key issues of the day, but that has not translated into any political advantage in the battle for control of the House and Senate in this yearÂ’s midterm elections, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.”
Well, that’s pretty handy, isn’t it?
You know what that means? It means that even if the Republican wins in another landslide they won’t be able to claim a mandate because it is ABC/Washington Post poll says that people still hate the Republicans. Yep. They got a poll. More people trust the Democrats than Republicans on a lot of issues, but, damn it, they’re not gonna vote for the Democrats! So the media people will take that to the bank.
If the Republicans have a 2010-type landslide, which is entirely possible, we’re already getting the setup here to say, “Well, they may win but they don’t have a mandate because our poll shows that people don’t trust ’em.” So that’s the setup here, and the midterm elections always favor the party out of power, which is even worse news for the Regime. But even that… They mentioned this in the story, and the point of mentioning this is the only reason Republicans are leading in these polls is because of tradition.
It has nothing to do with anything else. It has nothing to do with the fact that people don’t like Obama anymore. It has nothing to do with the fact that people don’t like Obamacare. Oh, no, no, no! That has nothing to do with the way people are gonna vote.” I actually think that this story is a variation on the Limbaugh Theorem for Congress. We’re supposed to believe here… I’m not kidding.
This is why I am host. I can take an innocuous story like this, which is really filled with deceitful stuff, strip away all the folderol and tell you what this thing really is trying to say, what they really want the reader to conclude, and it is this. You read this piece, and you’re supposed to believe most Americans back the Democrat agenda lock, stock, and barrel. Most Americans trust the Democrats much more than they trust the Republicans, but they’re not gonna vote for the Democrats in the midterms.
How does that work?
The Washington Post even says that despite how much the House Republicans are hated, that doesn’t mean the fall elections will mean defeat for significant numbers of House members. So it shows, how, A, worthless a poll is. But, B, how it can be politically manipulated to mean something that it doesn’t really mean. But they’re worried, is the bottom line. You’ve got this foreign policy business all collapsing now, Obamacare collapsing.
And then Jackie Calmes in the New York Times: “Democrats Try Wooing the Ones Who Got Away: White Men.” Let me take you back to November of 2011, and there was an op-ed piece by former a Washington Post columnist… I’m having a mental block on his name. He’s in the Dan Balz school, same era. He wrote a piece in November of 2011 saying that the Democrats were writing off “working white families.”
They were just writing ’em off. They were gonna focus the presidential election on turnout in the poor minority communities of America. They were just ceding the working class white vote. Now the New York Times says that Democrats want those voters back. You, in essence, is who they want back. Thomas B. Edsall, that’s exactly who wrote it. It’s Thomas B. Edsall that wrote the piece.
“Democrats,” it says here, “are working to deploy new, data-driven targeting tools to get the message to white men that the party is more in sync with them than they might think. ‘We can tell you to the number how many we need and where they live,’ said Matt Canter, the deputy executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.” It sounds like he’s got a pipeline to the NSA.
“No Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of white men since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.” What in the world does that tell you? “No Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of white men since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all prevailed with support of the so-called rising electorate of women, especially single women, and minorities.
“But fewer of those voters typically [turn out] in midterm elections, making the votes of white men more potent and the struggle of Democrats for 2014 clear.” As a little side note, I have had conversations recently with ranking Republicans, elected Republicans. No names. They’re not necessary. One of them recently told me… We were discussing electoral politics, and I was open, I was up front and honest. He was asking me my thoughts, and I said, “I must be honest: I don’t know your business. I don’t know how to get votes. I think I do, but I’ve never done it. That’s your business. You know much better than I what it takes.”
I said, “One of the big differences is that you cannot survive with people that don’t like you; I can. The people that hate you or dislike you are not gonna vote for you, but they will listen to you, as long as you keep giving them reason to hate you each day.” He-he-he. Anyway, that aside, I’m telling this guy what I’ve always said if I’m fantasizing about running, I would not go after people in groups. I’d just simply go after Americans as people, as human beings, and that we are all Americans, and that we all have the same basic desires and values and sort of build on that.
And he said in response, “Rush, the sad reality is the Republican Party can no longer win simply by turning out its base.” He said, “The American people are organizing themselves in groups. They have to be approached and appealed to in that way.” I still admit up front I don’t know the first thing about getting votes. As a practical matter, as a business matter, it’s something I’ve never done, and I have no desire to try. So that’s why, you know, I don’t sit here and tell these people they don’t know what they’re talking about. However, I still reject this notion that we gotta go after this group and that group with a different policy for this group and a different policy for that group.
Why can’t we have a single identity and then come up with ways to get people’s attention, maybe, based on their group. The problem, I said to this guy, was that it’s not just these people are organizing themselves in groups; they’re organizing themselves as victims of the country. They’ve been told the country’s unfair and unjust and has victimized them. And the Republican Party’s never gonna become that. But all that aside, it really caught me up short when he said that the Republican Party can’t win by turning out its base anymore, but the Democrats can. The Democrats can win, if that’s all they do, is turn out their base. And I said what about 2010 and what we all think is gonna happen in 2014?
He said, “Well, those, turnouts are much different than presidential election turnouts.” And he said, “You know why?”
And I said, “No. Why?”
“You’ve seen the map of the counties, not the states, but the county by county national map, whether it’s red or blue, this whole country is 99% red, until you get to the inner cities. You get to New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, LA, and they’re all blue. But everything else is red.” And he said, “In the midterms, most of those people in those blue places don’t turn out. They turn out in presidential years. So you’ve got a different turnout in midterms than you do in a presidential election.”
I had to acknowledge that, because that actually was borne out. The 2010 turnout was not duplicated in 2012. But what about the 2012 turnout stands out to you? What stands out to me is that four million Republicans didn’t vote in 2012. Four million stayed home, for whatever reason. I said, it seems to me that if those four million had shown up, we would have won, and we would have won by turning out our base. But it’s a fascinating thing. Don’t you think that the Republican Party might believe that they can’t win if all they do is turn out their base. If they really believe that, folks, this is a seminal moment that we’re in.
Because remember the old rule of thumb, and this is the consultants’ creed. Every political consultant goes to the candidate and says, “Look, we know that the Republicans are gonna get their base, that’s 40%. We know Democrats are gonna get their base, that’s 40%. That leaves 20% undecided, 20% independents, and I, consultant A, I’m the guy that can get you a majority of that 20%.” And so what has happened is that the Republican presidential candidate essentially runs a campaign aimed at 20% of the population. How smart is that? That’s dumb. They target 20% of the population trying to get 12 or 15% of it, ignoring and taking for granted that the 40%’s gonna be there. Well, the 40% wasn’t in 2012, for whatever reason.
But if the party really believes that they can’t win if they turn out every voter in the base, then that explains a lot to us. Or to me, anyway, about why they’re going on the way they are with amnesty and other of these social issues. In addition to the fact that they may not like the Republican base, you add to that that they may not think that they can even win with the base, well, hello. This explains why they’re branching out into Democrat areas and would explain why, “Well, Rush, Americans are organizing themselves in groups, and we have to approach them that way.”
But if you look at the 2010 and what’s gonna happen this year, we can win by shutting up and having people vote against Democrats. I found it really interesting to listen to some of the strategy here and some of the beliefs that I guess you’d say party elders have and compare that to what the Democrats are doing trying to get white voters back. They’re losing their shirts here with Obamacare. Democrats don’t want to appear next to Obama anywhere on the campaign trail.
And then I said, “You know, there’s something that really — I think back to 2010, and I just, again, sir, do not understand the way you guys do business, ’cause it seems to me that that turnout in 2010 was just begging to be connected with, and if the Republican Party had connected with that turnout, which was anti-Obamacare, and anti-big debt and spending, that you would have had a coalition the Democrats couldn’t even touch. And instead, that turnout, Tea Party, was ignored and treated as though it had leprosy. And there’s nothing you can say that’s gonna make me understand that.”