RUSH: Let me grab Teddy here in San Antonio.  Teddy, you have a question about polling, it says here.  What is it?

CALLER:  Yes, sir.  Thank you very much for taking my call.

RUSH:  Yes, sir.

CALLER:  Young Millennial conservative dittos.  I guess my question, I’ve been listening a long time and your attitude towards polls that have been this far out, at least as I understand it, have always been meant to shape public opinion and, as we get closer to the elections, they start to more accurately reflect so that they can maintain their credibility.  But now it seems like you’re saying that we just need to accept these and we can’t ignore ’em. 

And I just have a hard time accepting or not ignoring polls from ABC and from NBC that are all, you know, they’re all kind of conspicuously saying eight, nine, 10 points right now.  And, you know, polling science to me is about as reliable as climate science, so it’s a little strange for me that they’re all kind of in unison right now.  And I just wanted to know, I mean, I thought your old philosophy was very true and very accurate, and so now it’s kind of confusing for me that you’re putting so much weight in these polls that are so far out.

RUSH:  I don’t mean to be conveying that.  I’m not.  You have articulated my philosophy and my belief on polls perfectly.  I think polls right now are being used to shape public opinion.  Maybe I’m not making myself clear.  Let me follow this all, ’cause everything you say here is right.  The polling that’s being done right now inarguably is done, as Mr. Rutenberg has practically indicated, journalism has been thrown out the window officially now.  We know journalism’s been out the window for decades.  But he’s admitting it’s officially out the window now. 

So they gotta do everything they can to take Trump out.  Polling is one of the weapons that they’ve got, and I have no doubt that the polls are being used today to create public opinion to depress Trump support, to dispirit Trump support, and to energize Hillary Clinton support.  And, you’re right, as we get nearer the election, you can bank on the results being more accurate, because, at the end of the day these polling units are only as credible as their accuracy.  As you get nearer the election, the polling units will more accurately reflect what they find, because when the election’s all over, they all want to be able to say they pegged it, they got it right. 

Now, what I’m leaving out of this in my little timeline, for example, that you heard me do in the previous hour, is that in the case of Romney, I didn’t believe the polls ever.  And I turned out to be really wrong.  I kept maintaining in September and October when they had Obama up six and in some polls they had Obama up eight, I said, “Folks, that just can’t be.”  What I was doing was factoring in midterm turnout, 2010 midterms, where we skunked them.  But in the case of the Romney campaign, I was using 2010 and that turnout. 

And I was saying they’re forgetting that, nobody’s talking about that turnout.  They’re comparing the 2012 polling data to the 2008 turnout data.  And it was because presidential election turnout is much different, much higher, particularly among minorities, than it is during midterm elections such as in 2010.  And I was thinking, the mistake I made was I saw the enthusiasm in the 2010 midterm turnout, and it was huge, folks. 

This is the real frustrating things here as a side issue.  You know, we all sit here thinking the Republican Party is blowing it left and right, but the fact of the matter is they won two huge midterm landslides, significant victories.  The Democrat Party, from the federal level all the way down to local, lost almost a thousand seats in those two elections, House of Representatives, Senate, state legislatures, governorships, mayors. I mean, all of this, the Democrats just got shellacked. 

I figured that was Tea Party in 2010.  And I figured that that turnout was just gonna go nuts in 2012, I thought it would say energized, I thought it would show up again, because it was anti-Obama, it was anti-Obamacare, and here the guy is, and then the polling continued to show Romney down by six.  I said, they’re missing the 2010 turnout.  Well, it turned out the polling was dead on right and I was wrong. 

And I was telling everybody in 2012 not to believe the polls, because I didn’t.  I thought they were jigged.  I thought they were jigged up, rigged up, whatever, and they weren’t.  They just didn’t care about the 2010 turnout.  It wasn’t a factor to them, the polling units.  They only compare presidential years to presidential years.  And so they were assuming a much different turnout for the presidential race in 2012. 

So extrapolating that to this year.  We have 2014, a year and a half ago, coming up on two years ago, and it was another blowout.  It was another Republican blowout in the midterms.  Well, 2012, too, with down ballot races.  We’re winning everything.  Here’s the problem, as everybody well knows.  The Republican Party image is not that of a winner.  The Republican Party image is what?  Do nothing.  Despite all those wins, the Republican Party image is compromise, cross the aisle, work with Obama, show we can govern, show we can make Washington work.  So even those two massive midterm landslide election victories, which were the result of Republicans running for election on a conservative agenda, when they got there, they didn’t implement that agenda, they chucked it. 

And so the image of the Republican Party nationally is one of compromise, no fight-back, appeasement, fear, whatever, but it was winning out the wazoo.  It just wasn’t winning presidential races, which was even more frustrating.  So moving that forward to the polling discussion now, we have every poll out there with — well, there’s two exceptions.  But every poll with two exceptions has Hillary up either eight or 15. 

There’s a Reuters/Ipsos poll that came out I think Saturday or Sunday that’s got Hillary up only three, margin of error.  But then another poll has since been released since that Reuters/Ipsos poll that everybody’s using to cancel it out that’s got Hillary back up to eight, 10, whatever it is.  And then there is a new poll, a USC poll that the Los Angeles Times is publishing that had Trump up seven the entire week of the Democrat convention.  And after the convention, Hillary got a bump, and she’s up one point in that poll.  That’s a poll of 3,000 respondents, and 400 of them don’t change, or 500, four to five hundred.  Same people; the others change and they rotate out.  It’s a daily poll.  They release the results at midnight every night, Eastern time.  And that shows this race much, much closer. 

All I’m telling you is the pattern is starting to begin here, Teddy.  The pattern is that Republicans, conservatives, Trump supporters are now starting to say the polls are not catching it, there’s so much going on out there that’s not being shown up.  The polls are wrong, they’re not there, there’s all kinds of action for Trump that they’re not catching.  And I’m just saying, we’ve heard this before.  I’m just talking about the pattern.  The pattern repeats, and people think that there’s all kinds of support for our candidate that somehow is not being found and not being tabulated. 

But then, when you get down to it, when presidential race shows up in each of the last two — well, in 2008 I don’t think it was close, up until the financial crisis was announced.  You know, McCain was ahead of Obama ’til that happened. But in 2012, there were a lot of people that thought Romney was gonna win this and win it handily.  And the polls didn’t say that.  And the polls ended up being right.  Some of them got it.  Some of them got it wrong. 

But, no, no, you’re not wrong about anything.  I’m talking about the pattern that happens.  I just find it — what am I really trying to say here?  It’s too cliched to say I find it interesting, because it obviously is.  It just seems that every presidential election year repeats itself.  The polls come out, and it shows our guy losing handily, either by five, it’s outside the margin of error, five, seven, 10, in this case, 15, and then the pattern is that our side always claims anecdotal evidence to show the polls are wrong. 

In the case of Romney, we were looking at the crowds that showed up in the last week for his rallies, and they were over the top.  They rivaled Trump rallies.  They rivaled Trump crowds in terms of size.  It didn’t matter.  The rallies had nothing in common with the polling data.  The pattern is repeating here with Trump.  Not only is crowd size and crowd energy being cited, and it’s being compared to the lack of energy and lack of size of Hillary’s crowds, there’s a new metric that’s now been introduced, and that’s social media. 

I received this analysis in the email today.  Some people have gone out there and tabulated how much social media, and they’ve tabulated by who has followers and likes and who does the most tweeting and Facebook posting and all that, and this analysis shows that Trump is just clocking her, three to one social media presence.  Three to one social media positives, that Trump owns social media.  And they’re saying, “The polling data is not catching that. The polling data is not showing that.” 

I guess what I’m saying is it’s a risk here to just throw the polls out and say they don’t matter, because you end up creating a false reality for yourself that isn’t true.  The polls are now obviously being used to drum up support for Hillary and venom for Trump.  Hillary’s not doing anything to create this support for her.  Hillary’s not doing anything.  She’s not energized anybody.  Hillary’s not exciting anybody.  In fact, I got even more people here in the audio sound bite roster agreeing with me that the reason she’s going up in the polls is that she doesn’t say anything.  The quieter she is, the more invisible she is, the greater her numbers are.  And it’s true.  The more she shows up and the more she speaks, the more downward her polling data goes. 

Look, wouldn’t it be better if the polls right now showed Trump ahead, like they did all during the primaries?  You didn’t doubt those polls, did you?  How many Cruz people were out there saying, “It’s just not true. There’s a lot of Cruz people that won’t say so, a lot of Cruz people won’t admit it, but Trump, those polls are not right.”  I’m just a big believer in accepting reality and dealing with it.  And the reality that we are facing right now, as has been admitted to today in the New York Times, is the media is all-in, not so much for Hillary Clinton, but to destroy Donald Trump.  And they’re not gonna let up on this.  So I appreciate the call, Teddy.  I appreciate the opportunity to explain. 

I’ve gotta take a brief tout.  I got some audio sound bites to back this up, to illustrate what I’m talking about, and a couple of polls here to also illustrate people saying how there’s all kinds of support for Trump that’s not being found.  And we even have, I’m gonna replay for you Robert Costa, Washington Post, last week, talking about this very same thing.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Not believing the Romney polls might have been when my accuracy went down, in fact.  It could have been that.  But, I tell you what: Gallup has gotten out of the business.  Gallup does not do presidential rolls anymore because they just couldn’t get it right, and they don’t want to be dramatically wrong.  So let’s go to the audio sound bites, because Kellyanne Conway — a noted pollster with a great, great reputation. She’s been out there a long time.  She’s now working for Trump.  And she said on NBC, the Sunday version of the Today Show, that there’s a big hidden Trump vote out there that nobody’s finding. 

Willie Geist asked her the question: How concerned are you guys in the Trump campaign about these numbers?  ‘Cause they look pretty bad for your guy.

CONWAY:  The Reuters poll — which is an online poll — where Hillary is down three points to Donald Trump nationally.  And I think the important point to note there is when you have online polls as opposed to telephone polls, Mr. Trump tends to do better.  And that’s because the online polls approximate the ballot box where you’re issuing your vote privately.  We think there is a big hidden Trump vote in this country.

RUSH:  There you have it.  This is how this works.  I hope she’s right; don’t misunderstand me.  But I just remember during the primaries when Trump was leading with these astronomical numbers, the Jeb people weren’t out saying, “Those numbers aren’t right! Our guy’s got a whole bunch of hidden support out there.” The Cruz people weren’t saying that. Everybody believed the numbers when Trump was ahead, because you could see it and Trump owned everything, right? I made sense he was pick up by 10 points. 

Okay, well, now Trump’s not ahead. He’s down by three, down by five, down by 10. “Can’t be! Gotta be hidden.” So here comes the Trump campaign, “There’s a big Trump vote in this country that’s not being found.”  I’m just saying, it fits the pattern.  This is what we always do.  It may be right in this case.  Listen to Robert Costa of the Washington Post on Charlie Rose last week.  He is not part of the media contingent that thinks Hillary is going to win in a landslide.  Charlie Rose said to him, “How deep and how wide is this movement that Trump has, in a sense, accepted as his reason for being?”

COSTA: It’s wider than any party.  I mean, it includes some Bernie Sanders supporters. It includes some libertarians.  The most important voter in this movement, uh, when I travel around the country, is the previously disengaged voter.  They’re almost a nonpartisan voter, but they’ve given up not just on the political process, but they’ve disengaged from civic society. They don’t really follow politics. If that’s a real coherent voting block, then Trump — regardless of the polls — will have a shot in November — and regardless of all the mistakes — because that’s a huge block.  There’s so much of this country that rarely, if ever, votes, and if — for some reason — they come to the polls in droves, that changes everything.

RUSH:  Well, that could be the big hidden Trump vote that Kellyanne Conway’s talking about — people that never vote and are so fed up, ticked off, and think they’ve got a guy now: Trump.  Obviously polling data is not gonna catch ’em.  Polling data is of likely voters.  Well, that group is never gonna be called.  That group’s never gonna be asked.  And Robert Costa at the Washington Post is warning his media buddies (summarized), “You know, this is unlike anything we’ve seen before.  You can’t plug this into your usual playbook or formula,” and it’s a good reservation to have.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  This is three-days old.  It’s a Rasmussen Reports survey: “Sixty-two percent of likely voters think that Hillary Clinton and her staff deleted an estimated 30,000 emails from her server to hide something incriminating from the FBI.  Forty-five percent say it’s very likely.”  I mean, that’s… Most people, in the Rasmussen survey, think Hillary’s hiding something.  Okay.  So, you’re saying, “So what?”  Well, I need to know how something goes together.  How can most people believe Hillary is hiding something incriminating from the FBI, and she be leading 10 to 15 points in a poll? 

In fact, how does it happen that Trump leads by seven, by six and then the Democrat convention comes, and the lead goes from Trump up six to Hillary up by 10, 15?  How does that happen?  Now, I can understand, to an extent, some people getting upset over the situation with Mr. and Mrs. Khan at the Democrat convention. But not that big a swing.  I mean, these are people who follow politics.  These are people, by now, who know who Trump is and know who Hillary is. 

We’re not gonna pick up the people that aren’t paying attention until September, after Labor Day.  That’s the general rule of thumb is that these campaigns all really begin after Labor Day, anyway, because that’s when the low-information crowd starts tuning in.  And I understand the media’s ability to sway public opinion.  That’s what we’ve been talking about. It’s the importance of the New York Times story that I read in the opening hour here, but that big? 

You’re telling me that Donald Trump’s up eight points and then the Khan situation happens, and a bunch of ardent Trump supporters get so mad they say, “Hell, no; I’m voting for Hillary”?  I just don’t think people think that way.  I just don’t believe it goes that way.  Too many of these polls are just happen to be reflecting exactly what the media thinks, exactly what the media want people to think, particularly at this stage of the campaign.  Let me ask any of you:

Does anybody out there think that either candidate is gonna win by 15 points on in November, especially if these third-party and fourth-party people get in there? Are you also aware that there is an effort underway in Utah? That’s considered a Trump state. That’s a Trump state, and it’s considered almost an automatic Trump state, but there’s an effort out there to deny Trump, apparently. I can’t remember what I read this morning before the program.

But somebody’s opining that of all the religions in the country that hate Trump, Mormons are at the top.  Not Muslims, but Mormons.  And pointing out that Romney is Mormon. Mike Lee is Mormon.  Apparently there is an effort out there to put somebody on a presidential candidate third- or fourth- or fifth-party ticket just to take conservative votes away from Trump, so he would be denied Utah.  And that would mean even if he won Pennsylvania and Florida and Ohio, if he loses Utah, Hillary wins. 

I mean, that’s how convoluted this is all getting, and there are people following these polls and they get to the crosstabs and they analyze polls with eight pages of analysis and so forth.  And that’s all done. So everybody’s looking for that one glimmer of data, one bit of data in reams of data that shows the rest of it’s not true.  So the dependence on polls? I mean, I get it fully. It seems like everybody in politics relies on them for everything.

Which is another thing that bugs me, ’cause the assumption is that they’re infallible and that they are accurate snapshots of the moment and at this stage of the game. I just… I don’t know.  From the Washington Post: “Poll Finds Clinton Has Widened Lead of Trump to Eight Points.” This is from yesterday.  “Hillary Clinton has emerged from the two major party conventions and their aftermath with an eight-point lead over Donald Trump … according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. 

“Clinton and her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, now lead Trump and his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence, by 50% to 42% among registered voters… Among likely voters, [Hillary] leads by 51% to 44%,” a seven-point lead.  Here we go: Hillary “appears to have been aided as well by days of controversy that Trump generated with his sharp criticism of a Muslim-American family whose son … was killed in Iraq in 2004 and who rebuked Trump on the stage of the Democratic convention.”   

Now, let me just tell you something: I don’t know every Trump supporter, obviously.  But I don’t know very many of them who are gonna change their thinking because of what somebody says on stage at the Democrat convention.  Now, they might change their opinion because of what Trump says.  My belief is that the only person who can destroy Trump’s campaign is Trump, and that’s all part of my belief how firm that bond of support is with him. 

I don’t think media criticism can destroy him, but they want us to believe that it can.  And they, the media, want to believe that they can do it.  Now, Reuters. “Reuters/Ipsos Poll: Clinton’s Lead over Trump Narrows to Less Than Three Points — Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s lead over Republican rival Donald Trump narrowed to less than three percentage points, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Friday, down from nearly eight points on Monday.”

The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times “Daybreak” poll... This is the relatively new one that I was talking about earlier. They report results at midnight every night.  You can see it in a graph on their website, and they’ve got 3,000 respondents.  They claim that their results have a 95% chance of being right.  This bunch has had Trump up by seven, 6.5%, 6.85% throughout.  Now Hillary’s up by one point.  That’s her bounce after the Democrat con…  Well, Trump was up by six, so it’s about seven points for Hillary. 

But it’s not Hillary up by eight or five or 15.  And as of Saturday, that poll showed Clinton at 44.6%, Trump at 44.2%, and I think Hillary’s gone up a full point by now.  And then, of course, Kellyanne Conway saying there’s a huge, big, hidden Trump vote out there.  Now, let’s look at some of these individual stories and ask what the impact of them are as it relates to polling data.  But when it boils all down, the news of every presidential race this time of year is polls.  Make no mistake about it.  It’s an inexact science, and yet everybody throws all their eggs in that basket.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Look, bottom line, it’s way too early to count anybody out, to count anything out.  It is way too early.  But that’s what the Drive-Bys are trying to do, and it’s in the New York Times yesterday.  I don’t mean to be beating up on my buddy Jim Rutenberg.  But he wrote it.  He wrote what they’re doing.  Trump is so dangerous they’ve gotta take him out.  Well, we gotta apply that to everything we see in the Drive-Bys, then. 

We have to apply it to the stories they’re doing on TV, in print. We gotta apply it to the polling that they’re doing and reporting.  I’m telling you, based on what they’ve done, based on how totally out of balance, I don’t even want to use the word “unfair” ’cause that’s a childish word, but the imbalance here and the assaultive nature of this, Trump ought to be down 20, if you ask me.  The fact that he’s within three in one poll or five or eight in another, he ought to have been destroyed by now. 

You step back and look at all of this objectively, things they are reporting about Donald Trump, things they’re making up, it’s not just the usual racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic reprobate.  It’s hates babies.  It’s one impossible negative trait after another.  He ought to have been relegated to irrelevancy, but he hasn’t been. 

I’ll tell you something else.  For any of you in the Trump campaign, going back here to Kellyanne Conway’s point, and Costa, Robert Costa, these two things, you combine ’em. Kellyanne Conway, there’s a whole bunch of people out there that polling isn’t touching, that polling isn’t finding.  And Robert Costa says a lot of them are people that just don’t vote.  They’re so fed up.  And they’ve been fed up for so long that they don’t think it matters. 

They don’t think it matters who wins.  They don’t think their votes matter.  They’ve just become cynical, and they don’t even show up.  And I’ll tell you what else they don’t do.  They don’t register.  Kellyanne, if they’re out there, then they’ve gotta be found.  You’ve gotta find them and you’ve gotta register them.  This is why it’s important for campaigns to have organization.  Battleground states or wherever.  You’ve got to find these people that you claim are there and then you’ve gotta get ’em registered and then on Election Day, you’ve gotta get ’em to the polls.  That’s why all that grassroots stuff is really the heartbeat of the campaign.