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RUSH: The polling data today continues to roll in.  We have audio sound bites coming up. We have some people who think that the race is over. It’s essentially over.  Let’s start here with… Grab 20 and 21.  We’ll start with Frank Luntz.  Normally, what I would do is tell you that I’ve got these and then I would wait ’til they come up naturally, but I’m not gonna make you wait.  This is Luntz last night with O’Reilly on The O’Reilly Factor.

Question:  “What do you think about the CNN poll just released about Florida, Trump 47, Hillary 44?” By the way, speaking of which, I have to correct myself on something.  We had a call within the last couple of weeks, somebody asking me about third parties, and I said, “Nah-nah-nah. Third-party candidates are always going to hurt the Republican.”  It’s not the case.  Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, is taking major votes away from Hillary, ’cause he sounds more like a lib.

He sounds more like Bernie Sanders than he sounds like a Libertarian. He is, actually — according to polling data — taking votes away from Hillary.  There are a lot of things lining up here that are shocking, surprisingly, and stunning to the political scientists and analysts that we’ve all become accustomed to and familiar with over the last 20 years.  Anyway, here’s Luntz.  O’Reilly says: CNN poll, Trump in Florida 47, Hillary 44.  “It seems like the trend is everywhere.  Trump’s gaining, Hillary losing.”

By the way, she was losing before Sunday.

The Drive-Bys are trying to say, “It’s just a temporary blip and it’s all based on the video of Hillary having the seizure.” And another thing.  You know it could well be that she hasn’t seen that and some of the comments that she and Bill have made, maybe they haven’t seen that video but everybody else has seen it. Maybe that’s why there’s such a disconnect with what they’re saying versus what people think is wrong with her.  So, anyway, then Luntz cites the Monmouth poll: 66% of Trump supporters are appalled by Hillary.  They’re so appalled by Hillary, they’re gonna support Trump until the end.  Frank Luntz, what’s going on here?

LUNTZ:  I believe that the polling is going to move even further in Trump’s direction over the next 72 hours because of what happened this weekend.  They don’t like her insults.  They don’t think she told the truth about her health.  We see this trend everywhere.  If Donald Trump can continue his discipline and continue his focus on policy without the traditional insults? You’re gonna see him go ahead in states like Iowa, you’re gonna see him catch up in New Hampshire — and the state that I’m watching in particular, Pennsylvania.  I am convinced that he’s gonna start to close the gap there as well.

RUSH:  Let’s not forget Colorado.  We had this news yesterday.  Back on August 4th, Hillary was up 12 to 15 in Colorado, and they were saying it’s over, and Hillary pulled her people out of there. They stopped their ad buys. They stopped spending any money whatsoever in Colorado, and they were running around proclaiming, “Colorado’s finished. We’re done there and we’ve won it and we don’t need to pay any more attention to it or spend anymore money.”

And Trump is up.  And like Luntz says making moves in all these other states — particularly Pennsylvania — that a lot of people thought was impossible.  Here’s Alex Castellanos next sometime a, uhhh… sometimes Republican establishment strategist.  And he was on Bloomberg TV, All Due Respect, last night, and during a discussion of polling data and the race, this is what he said…

CASTELLANOS: (echoing) When you look at the real numbers in these states, though, you know, we’ve seen numbers with Trump up in New York, he’s up in Ohio, Pennsylvania, tight.  We had numbers that say that.  So, yeah. I wonder if this race is not already over and maybe Trump has won this thing.  You know, both these candidates have huge negatives.  You’re trying to burn down the same house twice. I’m not sure it will change anything, but there’s an element underneath all that, a desire for change.

RUSH:  It’s not underneath. There is a desire for change. It’s not underneath anything. It’s front and center.  Now, don’t… Folks, don’t go off the deep end here.  This just his opinion, Castellanos.  He’s okay.  He’s a nice guy.  He gets upset when I don’t talk about him, gets upset when I do talk about him or mispronounce his name.  He gets upset when I say things.  I don’t know.  He used to call Kit all the time.  Every time we talked about him, he’d call Kit.

“You guys!” He’s okay.  He’s fine.  He’s an establishment guy.  Watch, he’ll probably disagree with that.  I don’t know who he can call now.  Ha! Ha! Anyway, he says it may be over.  Now, don’t… Don’t let all this change your attitude.  You Trump people need to continue to act as though you’re a startup — ah, psychologically, mentally, attitudinally. You’re a startup. You’re still… It’s you against the world.

You don’t want to get cocky, you don’t want to get thinking this is over, ’cause you really don’t know what to trust and who to trust in the media. So trust yourselves; trust your instincts.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The Times is. They’re calling it a flop.  You think that’s sexist?  It implies Hillary Clinton is weak, old saw? It’s about women?  You know, the word “flop” and “women,” is that sexist — I’m just asking — in the modern era, in our modern culture?  I mean, because she flopped into a van on Sunday.

You know, so we all saw her flop in the van.  Now, the New York Times calling her new book with Tim Kaine a flop.  Fewer than 3,000 copies sold in its first week, and in 48 hours we have moved more I Am a Hillary Deplorable T-shirts. The LA Times, such a great… By the way, in the LA Times poll… This is the poll that the LA Times does with USC, and it’s poll of 3,000 people every day.  Four hundred of the people, I think, never change. It’s the same 400 people, and then there are 2,600 people that are new either every week or every couple of days.

It’s 3,000 people that report the results and publish them at midnight Pacific Time, Western Time Zone.  I think in this poll, Trump’s up six or seven. What is it?  Trump’s up six or seven in this poll, and the LA Times has a story stunned by the “diversity” of volunteers at Trump headquarters.  The LA Times paid a visit to Trump’s southern California headquarters — down in Long Beach is where the headquarter office is — and they have a story in the Times how shocked the reporter was by the diversity of the volunteers who were working in his office.

Steve Lopez wrote the piece for the Times, and said, “It was as if the whole thing had been staged, in Cambodia Town, no less, to belie the notion that Trump’s appeal is largely limited to older white males.” See, this is what they attempt to put out there, that Trump’s support is nothing but a bunch of bedraggled, angry, worn-out, relic white guys who are racist and sexist, and they don’t like any kind of change, and they hate modernity and any of this.

And this guy went out and he found that the people working in this office are Hispanic, they are female, they’re male, they’re African-American, Jewish, Filipino, Mexican-American. He literally was shocked.  The New York Times did the same thing back in March, and they had the same result.  They were shocked and stunned.  We told you about that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Back on March the 17th, the New York Times ran a story. They went to a Trump headquarters in Tampa, I believe, and they were stunned. They were shocked at what they saw.  The New York Times sent a reporter to Trump’s campaign office in Tampa expecting to find a bunch of Mussolini devotees and Klan members working in there.  They really did! That’s what they wanted to report.

They were shocked and they were stunned.  They found very few white people. In fact, it was mostly Hispanic, were some African-Americans and many other minorities, and they were happening, and they were supporting Trump.  The New York Times was bamboozled and flabbergasted.  They couldn’t believe it, and they speculated that somebody in the Trump office knew they were coming and they went out and hired a bunch of people to act like Trump supporters, and this is similar to what the LA Times…

I mean, not accusing; they’re raising the possibility, which this kind of projection. I believe if you conceive of something like that, it must be it’s something that you would do yourself.  It’s the Democrats that parade people in front of us like this!  It’s the Democrats that make all of these kinds of for-show illustrations.  Nobody knew at the Trump campaign these people were gonna show up.

“In Long Beach, one of America’s most diverse cities, that same diversity was reflected in Trump’s supporters.  Lopez,” that’s the writer for the Times, “spoke with a woman and millennials of Filipino descent, a Mexican-American, and a Jewish man, and saw the ‘names of volunteers from the African-American, Hispanic and Asian communities’ written on blackboards adorning the names of volunteers. He noted that ‘two middle-aged white people [also] joined the party.'”

The white people were the minority of all the volunteers working at the Trump office in Long Beach.  I tell you, this whole Trump campaign is sneaking up on the people that do not understand it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let’s delve into some of the polling data here.  It’s I think important to remember, folks, that Hillary was trending down in the vast majority of these polls before she uttered her comments about Trump supporters being deplorable and before having that seizure in public on Sunday, you know, where she flopped down there and they had to throw her in the van and take her off to her daughter’s emergency room.

Yeah, it’s amazing.  Her daughter, Chelsea? Her apartment in New York, her condo may as well be an emergency room.  Apparently that’s where Hillary was revived and whatever they did in there.  She’s been trending down for two weeks before this horrendous week she is having, and I think it’s worth remembering that, because people are blaming her decline on “one bad week.”  The Drive-Bys and everybody is trying to protect her.

“Ah, just temporary! It’s all due to her ‘deplorable’ comment and the seizure and the medical episode on Sunday.”  And I think her problems are much bigger than those two things.  Those two things are just symptomatic of the larger problems she has.  Look, our eyes do not lie to us.  We know via polling data that everybody treats as gospel that her negatives are sky-high, that she is not considered trustworthy by anywhere near half of the people in the country.

She is not respected. She’s not revered. She is considered to be dishonest and untrustworthy by a much higher margin than presidential candidates who win ever report.  She also cannot attract a crowd.  There isn’t any excitement about her campaign outside the official channels of the Democrat Party and the official supporters like the labor unions and the feminist groups and whoever else.  But among voters, there isn’t any excitement. There isn’t any eagerness.

She does not have a charismatic personality.  Her appearances are not things that you just have to see.  Trump’s are.  Whether you like it or not, a Trump rally is going to sell out, and there are gonna be people who want to get in who can’t, and the people that get in have a great time.  Hillary can’t draw flies. She can’t draw crowds, even to these in-the-tank Democrat groups.  The most recent example: She appeared before a Baptist convention in Kansas City at the convention center there — which is a huge, huge building.

And they had to get partitions up because the crowd was so small. They had to shrink, artificially, the size of the room in order to cover the fact that there was nobody there.  And look at her book with Kaine.  Not even 3,000 sales in the first week. And if you don’t move the meter in the first week, it’s over.  So this probably now is the second book that she has had that’s a flop.  She’s never had the connection with people that her husband has or that Trump has; she’s never generated this kind of excitement.

So this notion that Hillary is a fait accompli, it’s her turn, that this is a coronation? That’s all manufactured media stuff.  The reality behind it — and there is reality behind it.  Whatever reality and substance there is, is due to the fact that there’s a capital D next to her name on the ballot.  In other words: Party loyalty.  But personal excitement… And like I say, I was wrong; I have to admit an error.

The third-party candidacy of Gary Johnson — the quasi, so-called Libertarian — is really harming her and Kaine.  The rule of thumb is that any third-party candidate is gonna take away from the Republican, but it isn’t happening here.  This Gary Johnson guy, while supposedly Libertarian, sounds a lot like Bernie Sanders, and there just isn’t a lot of excitement.  You could say both candidates… When you compare Trump to Hillary there, the people that support him are off-the-wall, off-the-charts excited and into it, and deeply invested in it.

But the thing nobody gets… This is why the Never Trumpers are tripping up, and this is why so many people who are spitting mad don’t get it.  It isn’t about Trump.  I think… If I may be so bold, I think there are some people on the conservative side of the aisle and on the Republican side of the aisle who are not for Trump, and they are terribly offended that so many people are.  They are beside themselves that Trump won the nomination.

Remember, these people think that the Republican field — those other 16, 15 candidates — was the best Republican field in 20 years.  I think I remember Dr. Krauthammer even opining that he thought… Early on when Trump was pulling ahead, there were a lot of people wringing their hands and very unhappy ’cause they thought, “Oh, my God! This is the greatest Republican field. We got Jeb, we got Kasich, we go to Rubio, we got Cruz, we got Christie!

“Any number of these guys would be absolutely great compared to the Republican field in previous elections.” They were all excited about it.  Trump’s come along and just dwarfed everybody, and the mistake that’s being made here, is that I think a lot of Never Trumpers that are conservatives and that are Republicans are taking it a little personally. Mistakenly so.  It’s not primarily people investing in celebrity.

Everything thinks that this is a celebrity… Well, a lot of people.  A lot of people think that it’s Trump’s celebrity that is causing people to support him or his recognizable factor, his recognition factor, or that they’re just personally enthralled or whatever.  And that… Look, I’m not trying to ruffle any feathers here, but that could make some people unhappy, let’s say.  I don’t want to go so far as to say jealousy or envious.

But if that’s the case, if they are jealousy and envious, they’re wasting their time and missing the point, because the Trump support is not rooted in just the fact that people like Trump more than they like Cruz or they like Trump more than they like Jeb or that they like Trump more than they like Rubio or pick a name.  It’s what Trump represents.  It is who Trump is in terms of being an outsider.

I think a lot of people are wasting a lot of energy, feeling rejected either ideologically or personally because they just… I mean, they think Trump’s a boob.  They think Trump’s coarse, mean, rough-around-the-edges. Just… “He’s not at all of the character that we think we should have in the president,” and that’s not why people are lining up behind him.  That’s not why they are staying loyal to Trump.  It’s not that they don’t like him.

It’s that the movement that Trump leads now existed before Trump came along.  This penchant, this demand, this desire for somebody outside the entire political system. This has been percolating in our culture, in our society for years.  And all these politicians ran for office promising that they were the outsider, claiming to be the outsider? Some of them were even elected. They were outsider. Trump is the first one who really is.

And if Trump loses, their movement’s not going away, because the people voting for Trump are not gonna pack it in just because Trump lost.  This is not intended to be a put-down of Trump, either.  Don’t misunderstand me here.  There’s no rejection. There’s no personal rejection going on.  In other words, people aren’t choosing Trump because they don’t like Candidate A, B, C, or D, and it’s not…

You know, people are wringing their hands, “How could a guy like Trump be more popular than what I think?  How can a guy like Trump be more popular than Cruz?  How can a guy like Trump be more popular than a clean-living, great guy like Jeb?  How can a…?” It’s not what it’s about.  It really is about a whole bunch of people in this country thinking that they have been forgotten, taken advantage of, taken for granted.

Let’s go back to this Trump proposal that was announced by his daughter in the Wall Street Journal op-ed yesterday, the child care and elderly proposal that Trump had.  I fully expected when we went to the phones to get a bunch of people just outraged because, “See?” What I expected to here was, “Rush, see what happened here? This is what happens when you don’t nominate a conservative!

“Here we got a guy… We told you! Everybody knew it! This guy’s not conservative, and we got a guy who is proposing Big Government, an expansion of government.” And that’s not what I got.  And I asked Snerdley when the program was over: “Did you get anybody like that you just didn’t feel would be good to put on the air?”  I mean, some people don’t make it on the air just ’cause they can’t talk, folks, and because they get nervous or whatever.

So a lot of things go into call screening.  But he told me there wasn’t one call yesterday from a person claiming to be conservative who wanted to do a See, I Told You So. (sniveling) “See! Trump’s not conservative.  We told you. We told everybody. This is no different than electing a Democrat.” You know what we got?  We got people who are all in favor of it, because they have figured out the government’s giving away money, and it’s about time…

If the government’s gonna pass around benefits, it’s about time they got their share.  I saw a story. Do you know who when a it costs to settle and take care of and whatever else is involved a new refugee?  I don’t care whether from Syria, you name it: $67,000 per refugee is what it costs the federal government to get them here, to settle them, whatever happens, $67,000.

Now, the point is that there are a lot of Americans who do not like Big Government, who are conservative through and through in their hearts, but they’re fed up that the Big Government that exists today seems to be aimed at providing benefits and creating dependency for people who are not citizens, who are not Americans.  And they feel sold out.  They feel lied to, and they feel like they’re being mocked and laughed at and made fun of — which, of course, they are.

They’re called racists if they object to this. They’re called bigots. They’re called homophobes. Hillary calls them “deplorable.” But to these people, here are the people that get up every day or are trying to go to work or do go to work. These are people who get up, follow the rules, pay taxes. They’re doing all the things good citizenship requires, and they get laughed at and insulted.

And there’s one guy who is speaking for them, in their minds, and that’s Trump.   It’s not that Trump is (sigh) — I don’t know — George Clooney or popular like an actor would be popular.  It’s not that.  It is issue-related. It’s issue-oriented, and it’s made up of people who just don’t trust that the government cares about them — and I don’t mean cares about them from the standpoint of giving them money.

They think the government’s lined up against them to harm them while benefiting others at the same time, for reasons that they don’t understand, just because they’ve been here a long time, it’s not fair they’ve had all these benefits and now we’re gonna spread them around and deny them to these people, and they don’t think they’ve gotten them in the first place?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let me get back to the phones here.  That one went quite a while, and so we’ll stick with it.  This is Jamie in Kansas City, Kansas.  Great to have you on the program.  Hello.

originalCALLER:  Hi, Rush.  I just wanted to say that I felt like you when you speak about the movement behind Trump and what everyday Americans feel and what they’re tired of. I just haven’t found one error with what you say.  Everything that you say personifies exactly how I and many of my conservative friends feel.

RUSH:  Well, thank you for that.  I appreciate it. You’re referring to the way I explained this on the first hour of the program today.

CALLER:  Yeah.  I mean, you’ve done it several times over the last several months with the election, but certainly in that first hour you nailed it.

RUSH:  Well, tell me. The point that I made in the first hour, for those of you who missed it, is there are a lot of anti-Trumpers and Never Trumpers who are conservative and Republicans who don’t like people supporting Trump because they don’t understand how anybody can like Trump.  Trump is such a bombastic slob, he’s just a mean, rough-around-the-edges kind of guy. He doesn’t have presidential character.  How can anybody support him?” And my explanation is that’s not even a factor in why people are support.  They don’t care.

CALLER:  Exactly.

RUSH:  Don’t get jealous that people are choosing the ne’er-do-well over the fine character of your average conservative.  It’s not about that! It’s what Trump represents.  The people supporting Trump think this is it, that if we lose this election — more specifically, if Hillary Clinton and the Democrats win this election — then they believe that’s the end of America as they know it for themselves and their kids.  Now, some of the Never Trumpers laugh at that, “That’s absolutely absurd!”  They must think that; that’s why they can vote for Hillary.

But for the Trump supporters, it’s not about the fact they think Trump’s a great guy.

It has nothing to do with it.

It’s not that they like his hair.

It’s not they’re jealous of his airplane.

It’s what he is opposing.

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