RUSH: Get started with some polling data here.  One of the most glaring pieces of polling information that hit me today is this.  I found it in the Washington Examiner by Paul Bedard.  The Pulse Opinion Research Survey: “Most Hispanics in America Back Deportation and Want Immigration Cut in Half.”  They want illegal immigration stopped, Hispanics, 51% of Hispanics. 

Now, stop and think.  If this poll happened to be accurate — and we must offer that caveat about every poll, ’cause nobody knows.  What if this poll is accurate?  The Drive-Bys, the mainstream media, are just happily telling us as much as we can stand to hear it that the late-breaking early voting Hispanic population is showing up in droves, and they are telling us that that means it’s a huge win for Hillary Clinton in that demographic.  Now, we don’t know (other than party affiliation) how early voters are voting. 

That’s the only thing we’ve got to go on.  We don’t open the ballots. We don’t count them yet. So we don’t know who early votes are for vote for other than looking at the party affiliation.  The assumption is that Hispanics by a vast percentage vote Democrat, and early voting (we are also told) represents enthusiastic Democrats.  They just can’t wait to get out there and vote for Hillary.  So you put those two things together, and we’re being told that the early voting, late-breaking vast numbers of Hispanic early voters means that it is a Hillary Clinton slam dunk.

What…? And ever since this began, my question has been, “Well, who is to say that they’re all for Hillary?  Where did this get started?”  I know where it got started. It’s the Democrat Party and media, one of these bits of conventional wisdom. But it’s not true that a hundred percent of any group is for one candidate, one agenda, one party.  So how many…? What if this poll is true?  What if half the Hispanics voting in early voting are voting for Donald Trump?  Well, that just screws up every projection that the pollsters and the Democrats are making.  

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RUSH:  Now, yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, I mentioned that there were some people that were gonna release exit poll data all during the day today. Release it, announce it.  There are generally two waves released by the exit polling firm, which is one firm hired by all the networks, 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.  We heard yesterday that some of this data is gonna be purposely reported during the day, and apparently we’ve got the first such report from the Morning Consult polling unit, from their website. 

“Voters heading to the polls today are twice as likely to say they want a president who is a strong leader than they said in 2012.”  This according to Morning Consult/Politico exit polling data.  Voters twice as likely this election as 2012 to say they want a president who is a strong leader.  More than one-third, 36%, of 2016 voters said being a strong leader the most important quality when picking a president.  Well, who is that?  When you think of Hillary and Trump, and you hear that people say they want a stronger leader, who does that mean that they are voting for?  Who would you say that that…?

I’m just asking, folks. I’m just asking.  Answer it yourself.

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RUSH: When we get back here, this exit polling data that we’ve got here from the Morning Consult, I think we’re gonna be getting all kinds of things like this during the day.  What I was starting to say here at the time Governor Pence called, folks, I am being deluged with things, and some of it I can attest to; a lot of it is just people who are saying things and telling others and others are telling me, and I don’t want to start going down the road, “Hey, I just heard this report out of North Carolina, just got this from Nevada.”  It’s impossible to confirm it all.  The stuff that I think is worthwhile and legit that I wouldn’t have any regret passing on, I’ll do that, but it’s already started, and I’m just gonna do my best to filter it. 

But I do want to get back to this Morning Consult/Politico exit poll release on a strong leader as one of the primary things voters today are saying they want and how this is being portrayed on the Morning Consult Twitter page.  It’s interesting. 

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RUSH:  So I checked the email: “You can’t do this! You can’t do that to us! You can’t tell us you’re getting all this stuff and then tell us you’re not gonna tell us what it is.”  I knew that was gonna happen.  I’ll share with you some of what I’ve got that I think is pretty solid, but I want to point you to the Drudge page right now.  Drudge has linked to the Morning Consult/Politico exit poll data on a strong leader. 

You need to look at the picture he has posted above that link.  Exit poll, wants strong leader, take a look at the picture Drudge has posted above that link.  It’s Hillary being hobbled, walking up steps to a stage needing assistance.  Well done. 

On the Twitter page, I think this is at — da-da — where is it now?  The Morning Consult — I tell you, they must see this as bad news for Hillary because they’re hyping that article on Twitter by saying: “Exit poll, voters are anxious, angry, and just want the 2016 election to be over.”  When you click on that link you’re taken to the article with the headline:  “Voters Want a Strong Leader More Than Anything Else, Exit Poll Shows.”

So Morning Consult/Politico have released an exit poll that shows the number of people who want a strong leader is double the number of people that voted that way in 2012.  They hype that with a headline on Twitter that says voters are anxious, angry, and just want the 2016 election to be over.  If all of this showed good news for Hillary, that wouldn’t be the way they headline the link.  The link is, “Exit Poll Says Voters Want Strong Leader.” 

Look, another caveat here.  This is, you know, Morning Consult and Politico are official.  Remember what happened with exit polls in 2004 with John Kerry.  They were bogus.  One of the reasons I’m reluctant to get into all of this is that even with the best fact-checking and even with the best assignation of credibility to people, you can still get hammered here.  But here’s some of the other things that I have got so far. 

Pinellas County, Florida, where there are slightly more Democrats than Republicans, Republicans are ahead in voting by 8,000.  This is unofficial voter turnout.  But in slightly Democrat county Pinellas County, Florida, Republicans are up by 8,000 just in terms of the number of votes.  In North Carolina early voting, voting by ages 22 to 29 dropped by a whopping 66% from 2012.  That means the Millennials in North Carolina are not showing up, dot-dot-dot, for Hillary.  It just means they’re not showing up.  In 2012, Romney barely won North Carolina.  By Election Day Trump’s 142,000 votes ahead of where Romney was in North Carolina, and Romney won the state. 

Frank Luntz is out on Twitter saying watch Michigan, working class turnout’s looking much higher than expected.  Trump may actually have a chance in Michigan.  So that’s the sum total of what I’ve got now that I’m not worried about passing on to you.  

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RUSH: Late-breaking news took precedence over that.  Just to review, there is an election eve poll that came out yesterday from the Pulse Opinion Research Survey, and it was published at the Washington Examiner by Paul Bedard.

And it finds 51% of Hispanics believe there has been too little — too little — done to enforce immigration law.  What’s more, by a margin of 49 to 36% Hispanics “support a policy causing illegal immigrants to return home” by enforcing the law.  Folks, this goes against the grain of everything that we have been led to believe about the Hispanic vote.  We’ve been led to believe, conditioned to accept, the Hispanic vote is voluminously, omnivorously, overwhelmingly for the Democrat Party.

Like 70-30 for the Democrat Party, that the Hispanic vote is for amnesty, that they want open borders and they want anybody with a Latino or Hispanic last name to be permitted into the country, that there is almost a monolithic view.  So therefore when Hispanic voters vote, they are all voting one way, or the vast majority of them are, and that of course is for the Democrat Party — in this case, Hillary Clinton.  And we have been hammered with this — well, not just this election cycle. 

We’ve been hammered with this since George W. Bush was president the whole topic of amnesty and illegal immigration came up.  As conservatives and Republicans, we have been told that we’re on the wrong side of this and we’re never gonna win the presidency.  I want to remind everybody this.  Since 2004 and certainly since 2008, we have been told — by the Democrats and the media — that we will never, as Republicans, win the presidency again unless we change our policies and support the Democrats in “comprehensive immigration reform,” which means amnesty for whatever millions of illegal aliens are in the country at the moment. 

The Democrat Party has told us this.  The Chamber of Commerce has told us this, and Republican RINOs, Republicans-In-Name-Only, moderate Republicans, have been telling us this, specifically us conservatives, that we are causing the Republican Party to never win the White House again.  It’s all been put on us.  We’ve been told we have to moderate.  We’ve been told we have to change on this. We have to modify our beliefs and accept the notion of amnesty, because the Hispanic vote’s monolithic. 

Now, I’ve rejected it.  I’ve rejected it in principle.  I’ve rejected it logically.  I have rejected it because I don’t trust the political agenda of those telling me this.  I, for example, refuse to believe that there’s a single Democrat out there that ever wants us to win the White House again, and they tell us, “You guys are never gonna win the White House if you don’t change on amnesty?”  Really?  You want us to win the White House? You care so much about us, you want that to happen? I don’t believe that.  I also don’t believe that any group of people outside of African-Americans vote monolithically. 

We know that women don’t vote monolithically; we know men don’t.  You have to subdivide them. You have to go college educated, non-college educated; you have to go working class, upper middle class; you have to start dividing these groups of people to find voting patterns:  gender alone, race… Well, gender alone doesn’t do it.  Ethnicity doesn’t do it.  And in race matters, only African-Americans.  And that number is 92 to 93%. 

So that’s why it’s dramatic if you learn that African-American turnout, say, in early voting in places like Florida and North Carolina is down, which it appears to be. That does not bode well for the Democrats.  But this poll of Hispanics, 51% essentially support deportation.  That goes against the grain of everything we’ve been told.  Now, the reason why this may matter is because in this election cycle… Remember polling data is used as a weapon, folks, it is used to make and shape public opinion, not reflect it.

And we’ve been told that the Hispanic population of this country is massively in favor of the Democrats no matter who the candidate is because they want everybody of their ethnicity to get into this country.  That’s what we’ve been led to believe.  That’s what they want us to believe, that somebody named Garcia wants anybody else named Garcia in the world to come here.  That somebody names Gutierrez wants everybody else named Gutierrez to be able to be admitted into this country.  That’s what they wanted us to believe, that there is that kind of unity. 

Well, I have never subscribed to that.  I think it’s bogus. I think it is insulting to Hispanics and Latinos to treat them as though they all think like robots and thus can be programmed to think that way by the Democrat Party.  And this poll seems to confirm what I think. If this poll is right, if this survey of Hispanics is right, then it blows to smithereens what we’ve been told about early voting, particularly in places in Florida.  What they’re telling us is that late-breaking Hispanic early voting turnout in Florida means it’s Hillary Clinton all the way!

Well, not if some of them are voting for Donald Trump, it doesn’t mean that.  Even if 20 or 30% of them are voting for Donald Trump, it blows the whole model that the Democrats and the media are trying to get us to swallow.  So keep a sharp eye on that.  The next thing we heard — and I warned you about this yesterday — exit polling data is going to be released during the course of the day.  And you have to be really careful with this because I can’t shake my suspicions.

The same people that we don’t trust to be objective in telling us the news every day, are the same people doing these polls.  So if we automatically are suspicious, if we automatically reject the so-called objectivity of mainstream news networks, why would we not question whatever those same networks tell us via their polling data?  Exit poll data has traditionally not been released in terms of the horse race aspect until after the polls close. But a bunch of high-tech titans said, “This is all out the window. 

“We get the data, we’re gonna put it on our website.” A couple of them said this yesterday.  So what’s happened is that Morning Consult, a legitimate polling outfit, is partnering with Politico has released one to date. At this moment, there’s one bit of news that they have gleaned from exit poll analysis, and it is that a huge percentage of voters are saying in exit polling they want a strong leader more than anything else in the next president.  Well, who does that tell you that they’re voting for?  Who would assign “strong leader” to Hillary Clinton?  

Especially when you’re comparing her campaign and her candidacy to that of Trump.  Then if you go to the Morning Consult Twitter page where they promote all of this, this story that has the exit poll data that the majority or a vast number want a “strong leader” more than anything else, the headline to that story — the link — doesn’t say anything about that.  It says, “Voters Tired, Angry, Fed up, Want Election to Be Over.”  Well, now, that doesn’t sound like a bunch of people excited about what they’re seeing as it relates to maybe how Hillary Clinton is doing.

But again, caveats, folks: The 2004 exit poll data turned out to be almost exactly opposite of the vote count.  The exit poll data in 2004 had John Kerry winning, and early on looked like it would be a landslide, and George W. Bush ended up winning when the actual votes were counted.  From the U.K. Sun: “‘NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS’ — Astonishing lines of voters form at polling stations across the US as residents make biggest decision of a generation.”

And they have a clip from a video showing a long line of people “snaking through an American town as tens of millions of Americans go to the polls today in the biggest decision of a generation.”  Gotta be careful with that, too, folks.  I’m not trying to put damper on things, but I don’t like creating false anything — hope, expectation, what have you — and every year since I’ve been doing this, 28, 29 years, every election I get phone calls and emails from people telling me that the turnout where they vote has never, ever been higher. It’s just through the roof. 

It happens every election; you can make book on it.  So that doesn’t carry a lot of weight with me, although if it does tend to confirm the massive crowds and enthusiasm that we saw throughout this election for Trump, then you might have to consider it. 

From CNN: “Early Voting Data Suggests Clinton Lags in North Carolina Compared to 2012.”  This has to do with two groups of people, voters age 22 to 29 — that would be our Millennial generation — and African-Americans.  And in both cases, turnout, early voting numbers are way, way down from what they were in 2012. 

So they’re suggesting here that Romney, who barely won North Carolina with numbers far worse than are being reported today, are reporting that what this means is that Trump may be doing better in North Carolina than anybody ever imagined, according to polling data. 

Here’s another observation.  I made it in the last hour.  I want to make it again.  This campaign has been going on intensely since Donald Trump took the escalator down Trump Tower and made his announcement on June the 16th.  So we’re looking at roughly a year-and-a-half.  That year-and-a-half we have had pundits, analysts, commentators in the commentariat, we’ve had strategists, we’ve had experts, we’ve had you name it. We’ve had pollsters telling us for this entire year-and-a-half what the snapshot is of the country on that particular day. 

Think of all the polling data that’s happened, think of all that you’ve read, think of all the polling and other news, political news that you’ve seen, heard, and absorbed for a year-and-a-half, and where are we a year-and-a-half later?  Nobody knows what’s gonna happen today.  What does that mean for what this last year-and-a-half means in substance?  It means that every day we get all excited, we get anticipatory, we can’t wait for the next bit of news. We’re all hoping that the news is beneficial to what we want to happen.

We go back the next day for more and then the day after that we go back for more and we just keep going back and we keep going back and we hope and hope that the news we’re gonna get every day buttresses what we want.  Some days it does; some days it doesn’t.  But it’s all presented as though this is what’s happening, this is what we know right now.  And they’re telling us who’s gonna win.  They’ll take a poll in September of last year, they’ll poll Jeb Bush versus Hillary, then Trump versus Hillary and they’ll tell us what the result would be.  Last September, 14 months out, nobody knows. 

So after a year-and-a-half of all that, here we are at that day, Election Day 2016, and nobody can tell you what’s gonna happen.  The lesson is, you have to learn how to absorb all this stuff, and you have to keep in mind that everybody’s dealing with the future, and there isn’t anybody who can tell you what that is.  It tells you not to go through the ups and downs that they want you to go through.  Try to maintain an even keel.  It’s tough, you follow this stuff and your emotions are involved. You want to believe the good news you hear.  You reject the bad news you hear. 

But in the end, what does what somebody told you last September mean today?  What does whatever the news was in June mean today?  Well, in some cases it could mean something.  We just don’t know.  Maybe there is ill feeling toward Mrs. Clinton over Benghazi.  Maybe this email stuff that has been an emotional seesaw, maybe it has had effect, pro or con.  Not really any way to tell until tonight is over. 

So the lesson is stay engaged.  It’s never over two months away; it’s never over a week away.  It can end up being that way after you get the results, but you don’t know for sure beforehand.  In Florida we have the same situation as we have in North Carolina, at least according to early data, and that is that in counties where there are many more or a few more Democrats, Republican turnout is much higher.  We are hearing that early voting numbers are not nearly what they need to be for Mrs. Clinton. 

Then again, you have to remember that people are still in line to vote today.  People are still at home having not left to go vote.  People are still out there driving around, living their lives, not knowing if they’re gonna vote yet, and they’re hearing all of this.  And there are efforts underway as we speak to suppress the vote on both sides.  But the Drive-By Media is trying to suppress any Trump turnout.  There’s no question about it; you have to resist it.  It’s their natural state.  That’s why this news about — well, from the Morning Consult and Politico about “want a stronger leader” fascinates me. 

But, here, they can release something in the next half hour, another exit poll question that they ask the voters, and the answer to that question could indicate they all wanted Hillary.  You just have to stay flatline here and try not to get — particularly those of you who haven’t voted yet, don’t let whatever is being reported during the day today affect you.  If you made up your mind you’re gonna vote, make sure you do.  

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RUSH:  We got another story here from the Washington Examiner.  This one’s by Michael Barone.  This is not the same story that gave us the polling data on 51% of Hispanics think that there ought to be some deportations.  Barone piece is headlined: “Could Hispanics Be Surging to Trump?” And from the article: “The evidence comes from the Los Angeles Times/USC poll, and so should be taken with a grain of salt,” but still, the Los Angeles Times poll “is showing Hispanics voting 47% for Clinton and 44% for Trump. …

“Does this represent a surge of Hispanics toward Trump or away from Clinton? Probably not, in my view,” writes Barone. “But if it does, the big surges of Hispanic early voting in Nevada and Florida may not be as good a sign for Clinton as every analyst has assumed.” Did I not just tell you that?  Did I not just tell you? It’s exactly what this polling data means, on the surface.  For it to mean… See, the way you have to look at this is there are some areas of conventional wisdom that the media puts out there.

And they put it out there and put it out there and put it out there and just becomes accepted.  One of those items is that Hispanics love Democrats.  Another item is that every Hispanic wants every other Hispanic in the world to be able to come into America whenever they want.  So those two things are stated, and they settle in.  And the lazy analysts at the Drive-By Media just accept it and believe it.  After all, it’s their friends that are saying it.  They don’t question it! They certainly don’t question the idea that Hispanics think monolithically. 

It’s insulting, but they don’t question it.

Well, I do. (sigh) I know plenty of Hispanics that vote Republican.  I know all kinds of conservative individuals with Latino and Hispanic names, born in this country.  There’s gazillions of them out there, and they’re not automatically Democrats, and they’re not automatically pro-open borders and pro-amnesty.  But yet when we hear any polling data of Hispanics, it’s not that.  It’s that they are monolithically thinking about pro-Democrat and that they all are open borders.  So the polling data today just blows that sky-high.

So you’re looking at the polling data and you measure it against what you think you know, and you don’t know what to believe.  And then you ask yourself, “Okay, are they toying with us?  Are they playing games with all this?”  These are things you just can’t know and you have to ultimately trust your gut or trust somebody else’s gut who is telling what it means. (That would be me.)  So the LA Times poll does show a pretty even split between Hispanics for Clinton and for Trump.  That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. 

You’re supposed to get 70, 80% of the Hispanic vote going Democrat.  It’s automatic, they say.  Trump getting 44% in the LA Times poll?