RUSH: There’s so many confusing things out there. There’s literally no energy in her campaign. She doesn’t draw flies. She can’t attract and hold a crowd whatsoever. And when people do show up, they’re bored silly. fiWhen it’s 95 degrees and every woman in the picture is wearing tank tops and shorts, Hillary is decked out like it’s wintertime in Moscow. She’s got her Nehru jacket or Mao jacket on, she’s got long slacks, practically gloves. It’s the weirdest looking thing, and always standing under an umbrella or a tent to shield herself from the sun. And yet despite any, I mean, literally, folks, despite any evidence of her popularity, she is leading in the polls significantly.
And over here the guy that looks like a rock star is losing in the polls. And people are out there scratching their heads over this not quite understanding it. Salena Zito in the New York Post, actually by way of Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, great, great piece today that echoes some sentiments that I was making about Trump’s crowd, his supporters all the way back to last fall. And it dovetails with the observation Robert Costa made in the Washington Post three weeks ago about the Trump base possibly made up of a whole bunch of people who have never voted or haven’t voted in a long time and therefore are never polled.
And Robert Costa, Washington Post, is saying this is the thing that concerns a lot of Democrats. How many of those people are part of the Trump crowd really excited, all jazzed, how many of them have not voted maybe ever or only a couple times may show up and vote? There’s no way to find out. There’s no way to poll them, ’cause polls are likely voters, registered voters, and they’re not found.
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RUSH: Okay, to the phones. We’re gonna start here with Brad in upstate New York. It’s great to have you on the program, sir. Hello? Brad, are you there? Brad in upstate New York, testing, one, two, three, three, two, one, are you there? He is not there. Doesn’t matter. He was only gonna be a foil for what I actually wanted to talk about. The subject line of his call was — (interruption) Oh, he is there? After I’ve said he was nothing more than a foil, he is there. Brad, are you there?
CALLER: I am. I’m measuring my finger.
RUSH: Okay. Well, you were there probably all along. We probably had a tech screw up in here that nobody knew until — anyway, so it says here that you were taking a long vacation through rural America. What happened?
CALLER: Instead of getting on the I-95 we took two-lane roads all the way to Myrtle Beach and it took us three days instead of 12 hours, but we saw Trump signs everywhere. Now, I listen to you religiously, my wife never does, but she listens to me.
RUSH: Wait, wait. Where did you specifically see the Trump signs?
CALLER: People’s yards. A lot of people’s yards.
RUSH: No, but in cities, in rural areas? Where did you see them?
CALLER: Rural towns. Many rural towns. So we went through Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, all on two-lane roads except for the Chesapeake Bay.
RUSH: Let me ask you this. Were you shocked?
CALLER: I’m not. I use that as proof. I told my wife, I said, “This is why Trump’s gonna win. This is where the base is.” If they get out of the house and go vote, these are the people who don’t get polled and that’s why the media doesn’t tell us this.
RUSH: Not only do they not get polled, they are routinely impugned and made fun of and laughed at.
CALLER: Yes, sir, ignored.
RUSH: And ignored, you’re exactly right.
CALLER: So last night her phone rang, and she said, “Who is this?” And they said it again, and she said, “Yeah, I’ll answer your questions,” and it went on for 45 minutes, and it was a political poll. And not only do I not know anybody in my 63 years who’s ever been polled, there it is, my wife gets polled. I wanted to yank the phone out of her hands and answer the questions myself. But I was so proud of her.
RUSH: Who was it? What polling unit was it, do you remember?
CALLER: I don’t know that. But they were tied to one of our local Republican senators, George Amedore, and they were asking Trump versus Hillary questions and Amedore versus his opponent questions.
RUSH: Okay. So it was a New York — well, okay, that would make sense.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Look, the reason that I wanted to take your call and use you as a foil to transition to another story here is I’ve got this column by Salena Zito, and the headline: “Stumped by Trump’s Success? Take a Drive Outside US Cities.” If you don’t understand Trump’s success, if you’re one of these people that doesn’t get this, take a drive, leave the city, go outside the city and drive around and see what you see.
I remember making this point all last fall in trying to explain to people who Trump’s supporters were and what they found exciting about him and what about what he was saying they supported. Everybody was trying to figure it out last fall. It didn’t make sense to anybody. In the establishment, in the political circles of New York and Boston and Washington, it didn’t make sense because to them what Trump was saying should have disqualified him. He should have been disqualified after he made his opening statement after getting off the escalator on June 16th. And then he should have been disqualified after he said what he said about McCain.
“If you drive anywhere in Pennsylvania, from the turnpike to the old US routes to the dirt roads connecting small towns like Hooversville with ‘bigger’ small towns like Somerset, you might conclude that Donald Trump is ahead in this state by double digits. Large signs, small signs, homemade signs, signs that wrap around barns, signs that go from one end of a fence to another dot the landscape with such frequency that, if you were playing the old-fashioned road-trip game of counting cows, you would hit 100 in just one small town like this one.” Meaning 100 Trump signs.
“In Ruffsdale, I am pretty sure I saw more than 100 Trump signs,” writes Salena Zito. She writes for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, by the way. “It’s as if people here have not turned on the television to hear pundits drone on and on about how badly Trump is losing in Pennsylvania. It’s not just visual: In interview after interview in all corners of the state, I’ve found that Trump’s support across the ideological spectrum remains strong. Democrats, Republicans, independents, people who have not voted in presidential elections for years — they have not wavered in their support.
“Two components of these voters’ answers and profiles remain consistent: They are middle-class and they do not live in a big city. They are suburban to rural and are not poor — an element I found fascinating, until a Gallup survey last week confirmed that what I’ve gathered in interviews is more than just freakishly anecdotal.”
Now, let me pause in this to point something out. If you do pay attention to the Drive-Bys, if you watch the news, cable news, I don’t care what network, I don’t care what you watch or read, what you’re gonna hear from mainstream media types about Trump supporters is that they are almost all white, they’re almost all poor, many of them are unemployed, and they do not have any college education. That’s how Trump supporters are, at present, characterized.
And that is wrong. There may be some in that group that are Trump supporters, but Trump supporters do have college educations. Some of them are highly intelligent, educated. Some of them are doing quite well financially. They’re not all poor. They’re not all stupid. In other words, the Drive-Bys want you to think that Trump’s support base is Deliverance, and they’re doing this on purpose. So Salena Zito travels around Pennsylvania and says, “Gosh, this does not dovetail at all.” And she says it’s overwhelming. And keep in mind, these are people that have not voted in presidential elections in years.
And don’t forget Robert Costa in the Washington Post telling Charlie Rose how scared he is that these are the people that make up the Trump base and they’re not polled because they’re not likely voters, they’re not registered voters ’cause they haven’t shown up to vote in a long time. And 70% of the population think the country’s headed in the wrong direction and 50% of the population doesn’t vote, and he’s speculating that if these people show up in any significant numbers at all it will be a shock and total surprise and will totally blow the polling out the window.
The Gallup analysis that she came across is based on 87,000 interviews. Now, it’s not a presidential poll, because Gallup doesn’t do presidential polls anymore because they haven’t gotten close enough in recent polls. So they pulled out. They survey other things. And 87,000 sample, 87,000 interviews over the past year. And the analysis “shows that while economic anxiety and Trump’s appeal are intertwined, his supporters for the most part do not make less than average Americans and are less likely to be unemployed.”
Meaning, the picture the Drive-Bys are painting of the average Trump supporter is all wrong. And it’s not just what she saw on her trip through Pennsylvania, but the Gallup survey confirms it. Trump supporters, for the most part, make just as much or more as the average American. Of course, you have to throw out New York and Washington. Those salaries are not normal because of the demographics and the makeup of those two cities.
The study from Gallup backs up what many of her interviews across Pennsylvania have found, and that is that these people supporting Trump are more concerned about their children and their grandchildren. And, boy, I don’t care who I run into that’s a Trump supporter — in fact, I can add something to that. No matter who I run into that doesn’t like Hillary — not everybody’s a Trump supporter that doesn’t like Hillary, a lot of people don’t like Hillary. The people that don’t want the Democrats, the people that don’t want Hillary, whether they’re for Trump or somebody else, are concerned about their children and grandchildren ’cause the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Now, “While Trump supporters here are overwhelmingly white, their support has little to do with race … but has a lot to do with a perceived loss of power.” That’s another thing the Drive-Bys are lying to us about. They’re painting the average Trump supporter as a white, poor, uneducated racist bigot. The Gallup survey of 87,000 people doesn’t show this at all. It shows people are not concerned with race. They’re concerned with power and their loss of it. And I will explain what that means right after this.
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RUSH: Okay, country class people, as opposed to ruling class, Salena Zito here in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. When she says that the people that support Trump… It has nothing to do with race. “[B]ut has a lot to do with a perceived loss of power. Not power in the way that Washington or Wall Street boardrooms view power, but power in the sense that these people see a diminishing respect for them and their ways of life, their work ethic, their tendency to not be mobile.”
In other words, these people… Here’s the truth of this, folks. I think this really gets to the nub of it. “Thirty years ago, such people determined the country’s standards in entertainment, music, food, clothing, politics, personal values,” and then the blue laws went to hell, and that opened the floodgates. This is not an exaggeration to say that people like Salena Zito found — these Trump supporters — determined what the standards were in entertainment. It was…
You didn’t say or express cuss words on TV ’cause these people wouldn’t watch if you did, and they would turn it off. And they represented the majority of thinking in the country. Politics, personal values, the whole thing. They used to be the backbone of America in many regards. Now the things they believe in are routinely laughed at. The things they believe in are made fun of in movies, in books, in television shows. They are mocked.
They are called racist and bigots, and it is in this sense that they feel they are losing their power. It’s not so much power as it is respect and dignity. “The places where they live lack economic opportunities for the next generation; they know their children and grandchildren will never experience the comfortable situations they had growing up,” because all that’s out the window now. “These Trump supporters are not the kind you find on Twitter saying dumb or racist things; many of them don’t have the time or the patience to engage in social media because they are too busy working and living life in real time.”
Call ’em the silent majority, the silent number or whatever. We’re gonna find in November just how many of them there are. We’re gonna find out in November how many of them show up and vote. We’re gonna find out a lot of things in November, ’cause I guarantee you these people are not being polled. They’re not being reached. And in an even greater sense the people responsible for polling and the editors and producers of major media networks. They’re not interested in these people.
So they are out there lurking, and every presidential year comes along and they stay home because it’s more of the same. They don’t have to a political party. The Tea Party, maybe, was a vessel for them. But Trump has come along and has ignited them. Trump has come along and reenergized them, and that’s who they are. And they are not the filthy swill and swine on Twitter. They are not causing disruptions at rallies.
They’re not malcontents and protesters starting fights at Hillary events or any of that. They don’t do any of that. So we’ll find out. “These are voters who are intellectually offended watching the Affordable Care Act crumble because they warned six years ago that it was an unworkable government overreach. They are the same people who wonder why President Obama has not taken a break from a week of golfing to address the devastating floods in Louisiana.” So it’s a great piece. We’ll link to it at RushLimbaugh.com, and I’m sure it will be up there when Koko… Well, it’s Koko Jr. today, but Koko Jr’s fast, so it’ll be up probably before I’m even through.