RUSH: In the midst of all of this, you can find positive news for Trump. You have to really dig deep, but you can find it. You know the Los Angeles Times/USC poll. We’ve cited that poll on this program because for all but three or four days of the campaign, this poll has had Trump leading anywhere from 1.5 points up to seven.
As I say, after the Democrat convention there were two or three days, maybe a week, where Hillary was tied or up a point or point and a half. For the most part, Trump has led this poll, and another poll has gotten close to showing the race as this poll does, and the people that do this poll say, “Look, our poll is accurate because we’re out there finding people that haven’t voted in a while. Our group of people…” There are 3,000 people in this poll, with 400 people that are the same, and they do ’em every day. They release the results at midnight every day.
Okay, so the rest of the media has been very curious about this, like the pollsters at NBC/Wall Street Journal or ABC/Washington Post or CBS/New York Times, Reuters/Ipsos, CNN/ORC (whoever the hell they are). They’re all looking at this LA Times and saying, “Who the hell are these people?” Kind of like Butch and the Sundance Kid watching this posse always be on their tail: “Who are those guys?” Trying to figure out who they are. So the New York Times dug deep. The New York Times had to find out why that LA Times poll is at such variance with every other poll.
The headline: “How One 19-year-old Illinois Man Is Distorting National Polling Averages.” The New York Times has an entire story here blaming a 19-year-old black guy for the LA Times poll. “There is a 19-year-old black man in Illinois who has no idea of the role he is playing in this election. He is sure he is going to vote for Donald J. Trump. And he has been held up as proof by conservatives — including outlets like Breitbart News and The New York Post — that Mr. Trump is excelling among black voters.
“He has even played a modest role in shifting entire polling aggregates, like the Real Clear Politics average, toward Mr. Trump. How” is this 19-year-old black guy doing this? “He’s a panelist on the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, which has emerged as the biggest polling outlier of the presidential campaign. Despite falling behind by double digits in some national surveys, Mr. Trump has generally led in the USC/LAT poll.
“He held the lead for a full month until Wednesday, when Hillary Clinton took a nominal lead. Our Trump-supporting friend in Illinois is a surprisingly big part of the reason.” The New York Times had to find out what’s going on with this poll. They just had to. So they found this 19-year-old guy, and they say, “In some polls,” this one 19-year-old black guy is “weighted as much as 30 times more than the average respondent, and as much as 300 times more than the least-weighted respondent.
“Alone,” this 19-year-old black guy in Illinois, according to the New York Times, here, “has been enough to put Mr. Trump in double digits of support among black voters. He can improve Mr. Trump’s margin by 1 point in the survey, even though he is one of around 3,000 panelists. He is also the reason Mrs. Clinton took the lead in the USC/LAT poll for the first time in a month on Wednesday. The poll includes only the last seven days of respondents, and he hasn’t taken the poll since Oct. 4.
By the way, all pollsters weight. It’s w-e-i-g-h-t. And the beneficiaries of weighting are always African-Americans. They’re a minority population, and so the pollsters, supposedly with scientific analysis and procedures, actually assign more support or more opposition depending on what they see to the entire black population vote because they’re minorities and because they may be harder to find, and so they do what is called educated guesswork on weighting.
And the Times claims that this guy, this one guy, the LA Times is giving so much power to speak for the black vote that it just can’t be real. So they’ve got to knock this poll out. They have to destroy this poll. They have to discredit it. And they’re doing it by going after a 19-year-old black guy from Illinois. Have you ever seen the New York Times or the Drive-By Media criticize any poll for the way it weights minorities, for the way it emphasizes or adds emphasis for minorities?
In fact, if they ever criticize other polls, it’s usually because the other polls have not weighted African-Americans enough, which is what the New York Times and the rest of the Drive-Bys said about the Gallup poll in the 2012 campaign. The Gallup poll pulled out of the presidential polling business because they were wrong. But the point is: “Just about every survey is weighted… The USC/LAT poll is no exception, but it makes two unusual decisions,” says the New York Times, “that combine to produce an odd result. …
“A typical national survey usually weights to make sure it’s representative across pretty broad categories, like the right number of men or the right number of people 18 to 29. The USC/LAT poll weights for many tiny categories: like 18-to-21-year-old men, which USC/LAT estimates make up around 3.3% of the adult citizen population.” So no other poll has ever come in for this kind of analysis. No other poll’s come in for this kind of criticism. But because it’s an outlier and shows Trump way ahead, they have got to take this poll out.