http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2016/08/08/what_to_think_about_the_pollsWhat to Think About the Polls
August 08, 2016
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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
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 to 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.
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