RUSH: Now, the conventional wisdom on Trump. There are two kinds. The two competing theories are Trump’s toast already. “Trump doesn’t have a prayer! Trump is gonna have an array of negative ads launched against him the like of which he’s never seen. The Clintons have money, they have opposition research, and no matter how good Trump is, and no matter how good he is at ad-libbing and reacting, he hasn’t the slightest idea. He’s never, ever, faced whatever the Clintons are gonna throw at him and what the Democrats are gonna throw.” The other school of thought is, vice-versa.
“Hillary doesn’t know what she’s dealing with! Hillary has never had to deal with what she’s gonna be faced with. Hillary has never been vetted. Hillary has always been just there by acclaim,” and it’s producing some surprsies in terms of analysts. Mark Halperin — who is, you’d have to say, a steady leftist both inside the media and out — was on the Today show today, and he was asked: “What do you think’s gonna happen here?” You know, everybody that’s involved is being asked what they think. And Halperin, he’s studious, used to be at ABC, used to be involved in presidential debates. He’s with Bloomberg. This is what he said…
HALPERIN: People who say it’s impossible, I think, are the same people who underestimated him running for the nomination. You’ve got two unpopular candidates here, one an experienced politician. In a normal year, that’d be an advantage. We’re not in a normal year. Donald Trump will run against Hillary Clinton the way he did against Jeb Bush and say, “Business as usual won’t work.” Hillary Clinton will say, “This guy is not acceptable to be president.”
RUSH: His basic message to the Democrats is, “Don’t underestimate Trump,” which takes us to Nate Silver of the FiveThirtyEight website. Nate Silver used to be the New York Times. Believe it or not, Nate Silver during the 2012 campaign, Romney and Obama, Nate Silver — ’cause there was a lot of polling data that showed Romney was gonna win five or six points, and there was panic all over the fruited plain in leftist enclaves. But Nate Silver never bought it, and he was their link to sanity. But he admits that they got it wrong on the Republican side, which is gonna cause unease in a lot of places.
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RUSH: Well, Nate Silver. Here’s how this begins (this is the Business Insider): “In September 2015, writer and statistician…” This is not a rip, folks. Don’t anybody call Nate Silver and say that Limbaugh was ragging on him. I’m not. Far, far, far from it. “In September 2015, writer and statistician Nate Silver urged people to ‘calm down’ about the possibility of Donald Trump winning the Republican presidential nomination. Two months later,” November 2015, Nate Silver, “wrote that the media should ‘stop freaking out about Donald Trump’s polls’ and that Trump’s odds were ‘higher than 0 but (considerably) less than 20%,'” of winning the nomination.
“Six months after that, after Ted Cruz had dropped out of the race but before John Kasich had done so, Silver wrote: ‘Donald Trump is going to win the Republican nomination. Other than being early skeptics of Jeb Bush, we basically got the Republican race wrong,’ Silver wrote. It’s easy to cringe at how, in August, for instance, Silver outlined the ‘six stages of doom’ that he foresaw for Trump in the coming months — and how, in December, he updated the post to note that ‘the most difficult hurdles between Donald Trump and the Republican presidential nomination are still to come.'”
This site, FiveThirtyEight and Silver… Look, they’re like anybody else who takes what they do seriously. They pride themselves on their approach, and they claim it’s unique. They don’t actually… Everybody does polls and deals with results. What they do, as best I understand it, is they take all of the polling data and they run numbers with algorithms and stuff, and they come up with relative percentages that Candidate X will win the nomination and percentages that Candidate X will not, and those percentages fluctuate as the polling changes.
And it is that technique that Silver has really hit home run after home run after home run on in presidential elections, but did not get this right. And so it opens up a possibility, people, is there a Trump Effect in the polls? Meaning, are there people gonna vote for Trump that won’t say so? Just like the Wilder Effect. Are there people that say they will vote for an African-American but actually don’t end up doing it? So everybody’s kind of discombobulated about this, ’cause, remember: Polling data to news organizations and professional politicians, it’s gospel. They live and die by it.
They don’t even look at polling data as a reflection of public opinion. It is, but that’s not how they use it. They use it to actually make news, and they use it to try to shape public opinion, not reflect it. And when it becomes unreliable, they feel blind and naked, of sorts, and don’t know how to overcome it. So it’s just another small, little tidbit of information you have to throw into the mix here, because you have a genuine outsider who did not have a polling unit himself and did not have a campaign manager per se, did not have a speechwriter, did not have policy position people and this type of stuff.
It was a bare minimum campaign in that regard. And here’s another thing, too, folks. And this goes to the whole idea that the establishment class simply doesn’t understand and has no ability to see current circumstances the way people not in the establishment see it. It’s the old saw that many Americans think this nation is in crisis — serious, with-not-much-time-left crisis. But inside the Beltway, there is no such thinking whatsoever. And when people inside the Beltway are told that there are people who think this way, they pooh-pooh it. They mock it. They reject it.
Rather than study it, rather than trying to learn, they automatically claim it’s not legitimate. “It’s crazy! What do you mean, ‘crisis’?” Because where they live, everything’s fine. Their jobs are fine and they’re getting richer. Their schools are good. They don’t have to live with pockets of homeless people or illegal immigrants. They don’t live in high-crime areas. They don’t have health care concerns or any of the sort. Their economic concerns are much, much fewer and less than the day-to-day economic concerns of average, ordinary Americans.
So there’s this disconnect in that regard, and it’s big, and it all gets factored in as these people that make judgments on who can win and who can’t and who can resonate with people and who doesn’t. And if you go through it, people — I find it amazing that there are still… I do. I really do find it amazing to one degree or another that there are still educated, intelligent people who cannot yet understand why what has happened. And it really isn’t hard looking from our perspective. Looking at Washington from our perspective, we don’t see anything working. Not only do we not see anything working, we see what they’re doing harming and being counterproductive.
They have no ability to see it in that way, the people inside the Beltway, ’cause their life experience isn’t reflecting any of that. But you want to go down a little bit of a list of things? You have 94 million Americans not working. You have wages (what people earn) essentially stagnant, while the cost of living and mandated government expenses like health care are skyrocketing. The very idea that the government’s mandating, requiring you to buy health insurance! We are in free fall in our foreign policy. In the military, we’ve had a bunch of wars that people now don’t quite understand what the purpose was.
They supported them at the outset — I mean, really gung-ho, all-in for ’em at the outset — but they are questioning everything. Then you have the trade deals which have been popularized in this campaign. The state of education? The whole institution of marriage has been turned upside down and thrown in people’s faces and crammed down their throats. And the same thing is happening with transgender issues and bathrooms now. Just every tradition that people relied on, every institution that people relied on is under assault, and nobody’s defending them. The institutions.
Nobody’s defending it, and so there is a quite recognizable sense of panic. And somebody came along and was able to give voice to it and make a lot of people understand, think, realize, that this person (i.e., Trump) recognizes it and is gonna do something about it. It isn’t hard to understand, but if you’re from the old-saw political school of thought where you examine things in the traditional blueprint or playbook way, you’ll miss it. You won’t see it. So I think that describes largely where a lot of people are. Not everybody, of course.
I mean, the #NeverTrump movement’s still there, and I’ll treat you to them as the program unfolds. All kinds of major, big Republican donors are saying, “I can’t do it! I just can’t give my money to Trump.” The Koch brothers are thinking of going with Hillary, for example. Which really surprises me. I mean, they are libertarians, and that just blows me away that the Koch brothers would be all-in for Hillary. But everybody’s noses are still out of joint in a lot of ways. We’ll see how people are feeling and thinking a week from now, two weeks from now.
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RUSH: Well, right there it is. It’s in The Politico. “Republican donors want nothing to do with Donald Trump. … [I]n interviews with more than a dozen major GOP funders, not one on [yesterday] would commit to donating to Trump. … Others went further in expressing their discontent: Representatives of Charles and David Koch … warned the brothers could sit out the presidential campaign entirely — or even back Hillary Clinton.” (interruption) What? (interruption) You don’t think that’s gonna happen? (interruption) No, but I just… (interruption) I got people saying, “That’s never gonna happen! The Koch brothers? I don’t know what you’re talking about. The Koch brothers are never gonna do it. They’re never gonna support Hillary!”
Well, if you want to throw out what the Politico says, feel free.
It’s up to you.