RUSH: Okay, to the audio sound bites. If you’re on hold, if you’re on the phones, be patient. We’re coming to you el quicko. This is the sound bite from the Hannity interview last night that Fox has been playing all day long to get people’s reaction to it.

BEGIN ARCHIVE CLIP

RUSH: I still say that I think there are things that have yet to happen that are going to determine outcomes in some races that we don’t know. So it’s still very hard to predict. Kavanaugh feedback, reaction, was 100% positive for Republicans. The Democrats really blew that. But there’s 435 of these things and I don’t know. I just rely on hope — which is, again, naive. I don’t have survey data; I don’t trust it. It hasn’t been right consistently enough for me. The people doing these surveys desperately want Trump gone. I don’t know how they can take that out of their work. I don’t believe in pure objectivity, so I distrust.

HANNITY: If I put you on the spot, prediction?

RUSH: We hold the House and we increase the Senate, because I think that’s justice. I think that’s just. I think the Democrat Party deserves to lose in the single biggest landslide defeat in my lifetime —

HANNITY: And you…?

RUSH: — because of the actions they’ve taken just in the last month.

END ARCHIVE CLIP

RUSH: That bite lit up the Fox News Channel today. Our first stop is America’s Newsroom. Bill Hemmer. Today, and I think it’s Julie Banderas co-host that they’re talking to, famed Republican strategerist Ed Rollins about my comment.

HEMMER: Dems deserve to lose —

ROLLINS: Well, he’s —

HEMMER: — says Limbaugh.

ROLLINS: He’s correct on that front. (laughter) He’s half right on the other front. I think we’ll add some Senate seats. I think the House is very, very much in jeopardy.

HEMMER: So you are not buying into…?

ROLLINS: No, there are —

HEMMER: Governor Sununu said they’d hold it. Rush Limbaugh said they’d hold it.

ROLLINS: They don’t count votes like I do. I mean, I ran the congressional committee. I’ve been doing it a long time. There are 15 seats that are now gone. Nine of those are the open seats. There’s another 25 to 30 that are our seats that are in play, there’s only about two or three Democrat seats that are in play. We’re totally on the defense. Everything has to go our way to basically break even.

RUSH: Let me run through that. This is the stuff… I’m going to be honest with you. I do not get into this stuff. This is wonk stuff. And, to me, this is totally absent any… What’s the word… Any, any personality or… This is just raw numbers based on data that is the result of polling. I know as well as anybody that polling sometimes is right. Sometimes it’s wrong, and I just, like I said in the bite, I’m just suspicious of polling units.

Because I don’t think these people can take their passion and their desired outcome out of their work, and we know that they don’t. We looked at the presidential polls in 2016. Those people were all literally caught short. There was no way Donald Trump was going to win. It was just not possible. Hillary was going to win in a landslide. Maybe not the biggest ever, but Trump didn’t have a prayer. And there was one, maybe two polls that showed that he was really in it and could win it. Rasmussen was one; they were ignored.

We have a replay here. See, what informs me, what makes me make these kind of predictions is reality. As I also mentioned last night, since Barack Obama was elected in 2008, starting in 2010, including the midterms in 2012 and the midterms in 2014, and the election in 2016, the Democrat Party has lost 1200 seats. The trend is people voting out Democrats. And that was happening while the Democrats were in the White House with Obama there. That could be a factor.

Obama is gone, so maybe the anti-Democrat sentiment is not as high as it used to be when he was there. Because I do believe he was a drag on the Democrat Party. But then I asked myself what has happened in the last two years to make people all of a sudden want to elect Democrats again? As everybody is telling us is going to happen, “House is gone, Rush.” The Senate. Yeah, we’ll probably pick up a couple of… “Houses is gone…”

And then they say, “Because Rush, these House races have nothing to do with any of the way you’re looking at this. These are really local races, and they have to do with things that are not on any national radar.” Well, not true, if these races are being nationalized by the various candidates in them. But anyway, what has happened to make people all of a sudden stop rejecting Democrats? Are the Democrats, have they done a 180?

Are they now performing and executing and behaving in ways that make people love them again? Well, no, not in a just and sane world. The Democrats aren’t doing anything that would grow support. They’re promoting rage and anger. They’re promoting insanity and lunatic behavior. So then, okay, maybe is it Trump? Is there this much opposition to Trump from people who didn’t care one way or the other two years ago?

Has the media succeeded in creating a bunch of anti-Trump sentiment in a midterm turnout profile of voters? Well, that would have to be what it is because the Democrats are not… The Democrats, as I say, the justice associated with what the Democrats are doing is landslide defeat. The Democrats are not responsible for anything good happening in this country. And they’re not even trying to be associated.

They don’t even try to claim credit for the economy. They did for a couple of weeks. They trotted Obama out. Remember, Obama was trying to say the economy was his. Well, that went over like a lead balloon, and they died with it. So they abandoned that. And outside of that, there hasn’t been one attempt by the Democrats to associate themselves with anything good happening in America.

They have instead continued to try and portray America as this unfair, unjust, undeserved, exceptional superpower that discriminates, that violates, that impugns, that… It’s all negative. So I’m just… Where is this body of evidence that suggests the trend of voting against Democrats has reversed? Again, I acknowledge House races are not the same as a presidential race with national issues and national turnout on ballots. Shannon Bream last night, Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream, wonders what my strategy was in predicting what I predicted.

BREAM: Almost no polling shows the Republicans are going to hold on to the House. So where do you think this is coming from with Rush Limbaugh? What’s the strategy?

HILTON: I tend to agree with him. I think what we could be seeing is again the phenomenon that the polling expert called the spiral of silence, the shy Trump voters, the shy Brexit voters, the kind of people who know that it is not the dumb thing necessarily to support a particular view, but secretly in the polling booth, that’s what they do.

RUSH: That’s Steve Hilton who has a weekend show on Fox and he was instrumental in the Brexit vote in the U.K. So Bream asks, “Where is Limbaugh getting this? There’s not a single poll out there showing this happening.” Precisely my point. Not a single poll. Not a single poll shows it. So for this, we are to conclude. And these people live and die by polls. I’m telling you, folks, nine out of ten people in D.C. live and die by them. They are gospel.

I really think if I lived in Washington each and every day… I couldn’t. I would be ostracized after not too long. I just couldn’t get with the program living there. I have known that for many, many moons. So Hilton says… I tend to agree with him, I think there’s a lot of people, don’t tell the pollsters the truth. A lot of people don’t even answer when the pollsters call. I think there’s a lot of people not being contacted. Up next, Kayleigh McEnany, who is the spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee.

McENANY: Steve is spot on, so is Rush Limbaugh about the hidden Trump voter. I talked to a pollster who said to me that in the aftermath of the election he went out in Michigan and California and 37% of Trump voters said they refused to tell a pollster when they were called that they supported President Trump. 37%. That’s nearly a third of the Trump voters.

RUSH: All right. So at least Fox was able to find a couple of people who agree. (unintelligible) Shannon Bream. I don’t have a strategy behind this. I’m just answering the question, what I think. I’ve got no strategy. I’m not trying to make people change the way they are voting. That’s not the purpose of my comment here. I was asked a question, and I gave the answer to it. And the answer is rooted in my instinctive distrust of conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is group think. Even if it is right. I’m reluctant to sign on to it just because the group thinks it. It has to be really right.

Now, here’s Trump, this is last night, Missoula, Montana, this is Trump framing the midterm.

THE PRESIDENT: Come election day, Americans will remember Kavanaugh, and they will remember all sorts of other things because that was a shameful act, and there are many other shameful acts, including what they’re doing to our border by saying, we’re not gonna to give you the laws that you need to protect our country, but we’re taking it and we’re doing it, and we have great things happening. This will be —

CROWD: (cheering)

THE PRESIDENT: — an election of Kavanaugh, the caravan, law and order, and common sense. That’s what it’s going to be.

RUSH: So I had some people say, “Trump, this is bad, Rush. This is really… Kavanaugh? People don’t know what that means. What is he talking about, Kavanaugh?” “I said what do you mean, people don’t know what he’s talking about Kavanaugh?” “Well, he’s got to explain what happened. This is not… Trump ought to be harpin’ on this immigration in the media. Harping on the specifics about why Kavanaugh is Kavanaugh and not just saying the word.”

Okay. All right. Just to show you that there’s some concern out there. Here’s Maggie Haberman who used to be political. Now she’s at the New York Times. She’s considered one of the star info babes there. On CNN today, John Berman said, “The numbers are up on border crossings from last year, but they are still very low historically. It doesn’t help Trump’s narrative if the number of illegals go up on his watch.” That wasn’t supposed to happen, Maggie. Trump’s in there. Illegal immigration is supposed to go down. So what do you say about that?

HABERMAN: We’re not in a world where fact checks are impacting voters and everything in our politics right now is very much based on emotion. He knows that. It is one of the things he has a specific genius about in terms of tapping into. The president is reaching for the thing that he believes helps in the primary, and it did. It was a uniting issue for his supporters. The sense of crisis he’s trying to create reminds me of what the real sort of raw emotion was in 2014 around the midterms and immigration. And that was at a moment when ISIS was on the rise. There was an Ebola threat and conservative talk radio was essentially all about melding these two along with border crossings.

RUSH: Ah, there’s the genius she was talking about.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here is Mike in Tallahassee. Great to have you with us, sir. How are you?

CALLER: I’m doing great, Rush. Thanks a lot.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: Your open question earlier was: What makes the Democrats think they are going to retake the Congress? I think the answer lies in group-think. I believe that the Democratic leadership and spokespeople — which only constitute a small percentage of the party — hate Trump so much, it’s so visceral, it’s blinded them to the fact that most Democrats are apathetic because they have jobs. The economy is doing well, and they have begrudgingly admit that the president is doing a lot of great things. But the leadership of the Democratic Party is blinded by their own passion.

RUSH: Well, there’s no question about that. The Democrat Party leadership, including in the media, are obsessed with their hatred for Trump. So you think they are so blindingly enraged that they then assume everybody else is?

CALLER: Exactly, and they think that’s going to produce the voter turnout that they didn’t have during the presidential election that would change the leadership of the House and Senate.

RUSH: Well, yeah. Okay. You’re kind of on my same page here. I’m looking at what has changed that is going to reverse the fortunes of the Democrats who have been losing elections who have not been turning out voters? It isn’t issue related because they are not opposing any, and they are certainly not advocating any. All they are doing is ripping and bullying and so forth.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: So your theory is that they are fooling themselves, that they think they have —

CALLER: Exactly right

RUSH: — this massive hate-Trump movement out there that they’ve created that’s going to show up in droves and sweep Republicans out of office.

CALLER: Yeah. Most Democrats are admitting that the economy is doing well. They may not like the president’s techniques, but they have to admit that (unintelligible).

RUSH: Now, wait a minute. Wait a minute. What “most Democrats”? Where are you seeing most Democrats begrudgingly admit that the economy is doing well?

CALLER: Unfortunately, my entire family is Democratic, except for me. I socialize with Democrats because they’re nice people.

RUSH: Okay. So are you concluding, then, that there’s not…? Like your family that is begrudgingly admitting things are getting better, they do not blindly hate Trump?

CALLER: They don’t blindly hate Trump and they don’t feel like their vote is going to matter.

RUSH: What? So you’re telling me they are not all that excited to show up and vote.

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: So, you’re calling from Tallahassee. What is your family’s thoughts on Andrew Gillum?

CALLER: He’s dangerous.

RUSH: In a good way or bad way?

CALLER: No, I’m not sure that dangerous can ever be good. Lack of experience —

RUSH: Well, I’m the Most Dangerous Man in America because it’s good.

CALLER: Well, I guess so.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: That’s right.

RUSH: That’s how it works. You can be good dangerous and be good. Andrew Gillum is a Democrat candidate for governor. He’s running against [Ron] DeSantis. The guy is… Pshew! “Dangerous” is the right word, but your family — mostly Democrats — are not into the guy, is that what you’re saying?

CALLER: Well, most of my family is in the Midwest.

RUSH: What about Democrats? You said you know some Democrats that are nice people, though.

CALLER: Yeah, they are, and none of them support Gillum, because they have watched his act as mayor of Tallahassee. When you ask them about him, they look down at their shoes and shake their heads.

RUSH: All right. Well, all of this is… By the way, the word is A-N-E-C-D-O-T-A-L. Anecdotal. Some people think it’s “anti-dotal.” That would be against dotal, and there is no such thing as against dotal. There’s no pro-dotal; there’s no anti-dotal. This is anecdotal. It just means unscientific. It’s hearsay, a person talking to four or five others. It’s really dangerous to start projecting. You talk to four or five Democrats who think, “Trump is okay. Eh, he’s not the best guy but the economy is going great. Ahh, I don’t think I’m going to vote.”

You can’t take out those four people and make it scientific that the Democrats are going to have a turnout problem, even though that’s what Mike is postulating here. His point is that the Democrat leadership and the media leadership is really kind of alone. They are enraged. They are blinded by their hatred so much so that they think everybody like them, hates Trump, and that this is going to drive Democrats back to the polls more than anything has since Obama in 2008.

And it’s the old negative… There is such a thing as negative turnout, but it’s not meant, as it’s being said. Negative turnout is you turn out to oppose something that you are mightily wary of or afraid of. The kind of negative turnout we’re talking about here is Democrats turning out in droves because they despise Trump and so forth. He’s just saying he doesn’t think that exists all across and throughout the Democrat Party. We will see. Time will tell in not too long.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So the ratings are in for cable news last night. I don’t really, folks, like to make a good deal by these, because you live by the ratings; you die by them and we have ratings insurance. But it was a really good night for the Sean Hannity folks and Fox News in general. The Beto O’Rourke town hall didn’t even rate as much as CNN usually gets. It was a bomb. Did I say that? It was certainly nothing to write to your mom about.