RUSH: Chris in Pleasanton, California. Great to have you on the program, and I really appreciate your patience. Hello.
CALLER: Yeah, hi, Rush. Mega dittos.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I was watching Dr. Charles Krauthammer on Fox last night, and he was saying in no uncertain terms that Trump has absolutely no chance if he makes it to the general election. He was even saying it will be worse than Goldwater in ’64, and his reasoning in part was there’s so many negatives about him and he basically will have no opportunity to modify his tone and change his tactics, and the reason is because there’s such a thing, as he put it, as recordings and videotape. I’m watching this and I’m screaming at the television, “Well, we got recordings and videotape of pundits like you for the last six months being wrong daily, weekly! It’s the same thing. We can go back and look!” He has no shame or no recognition of that fact. It’s very irritating.
RUSH: Well, now, wait just a second. Just one minor correction. Dr. Krauthammer did acknowledge last week about something very crucial on Trump that he was wrong and had been wrong. I think he actually even used the word “apologize” for laughing all along at Trump. He was of the belief that Trump would never be taken seriously, would never amount to anything, whatever it was, and he acknowledged last week that he’d been wrong about it. So he knows — you’re right — that there is videotape evidence of all these pundits, too, in addition to videotape evidence of the candidates.
The theory is that Trump’s negatives are so high that there’s no amount of acting presidential he can do to reverse them. The conventional wisdom… Remember now, he’s one of the establishment types here, Chris, and they believe polling data is the closest thing to the Bible and in many cases it is the Bible. So if in polling data your unfavorables with women are, say, 60%, you’re done. Stick a fork in you. There’s no reversing that.
You can’t win anything, no matter how much avid support you’ve got. You got that much negative, and you can’t convert that to votes. Those are votes automatically for other people. That’s what they think is instant death. You can’t have unfavorables any higher than 40 and win anything, and that’s at the outside. They want unfavorables around 20, 25 max. Anything higher than that and you’re toast, in their world.
CALLER: Rush, don’t you think the whole issue is a bit of a red herring? I saw Karl Rove. I think it was last week as well. He was saying the reason he was not in favor of Trump is the same thing: He has no chance. But if you think about it, his idea of somebody maybe coming in from the outside and being a white knight — somebody that didn’t even run in the primaries — that person would have a chance. I don’t think they’re even bringing this up. I don’t think they really believe this. My greatest fear is like you said earlier. So many of these guys really are okay with something like Hillary winning.
RUSH: There you go.
CALLER: And I don’t —
RUSH: That’s something, don’t ever forget that. I don’t know how big a percentage of the quote/unquote Republican or conservative establishment population is of that view, but it’s significant enough that it’s not news. I mean, they will gladly lose a presidential election. Remember, these people don’t think the country’s in crisis to begin with. They don’t look at the circumstances in the country like your average Trump voter does, your average Cruz voter does. We all think that we’re in a crisis, and if we don’t stop where we’re going, the country has founded ceases to exist.
And it could be this election.
They don’t think anything like that, Chris.
They don’t at all.
To them this is just the evolutionary period where the Democrats are in the White House and their turn is coming. Beyond that, they’re doing great! They’re all earning a lot of money. Their homes are all nice. The unemployment rate where they live’s around 3%. Everything’s fine. They don’t see or sense a crisis. And when people do, they think those people are stupid. They think those people are reactionary, not balanced or what have you. So if you start out thinking we’re not in a crisis, and your primary objective is to protect what you’ve got, if that means Hillary has to win the next election, then so be it.
CALLER: Well, that’s… It’s a scary thing to me.
RUSH: But I think there’s so much in this campaign cycle. We’ve already had… I can’t count the number of so-called “you can’t get away with that” that have happened and people have continued to do well. I think of the number of “campaign violations” that are considered to be instant death for any candidate. The candidates have survived all kinds of things. My point is that I think some of the ways that establishment types analyze elections are not gonna work in this cycle. For example, talk about Trump’s negatives with women, whatever they are.
They’re over 50, right?
They’re 55%, whatever it is.
I guarantee you the Trump camp thinks they can win despite that. They’re not at all deterred by it. And there are a number of other people that think that. I think some of the establishment types even think Trump can win; that’s why they’re panicking. I think enough of ’em realize that some of the old rules here are just out the window in this campaign. Trump wasn’t supposed to survive opening day, in their world. His opening announcement should have nailed his campaign right there. It should have been the last coffin nail. And then every subsequent remark, they can’t believe he survived. So all these things they use to tell you about who’s gonna win, who can’t win?
I think it’s all out the window in this particular season.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You know, when you talk about female negatives, look at Hillary’s. Hillary’s negatives with women are just as high as Trump’s are, and nobody over there is talking about how it dooms her candidacy. Go figure that out. How come it doesn’t apply to her? She ought to be as disqualified as they all say Trump is.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Yeah, Hillary Clinton’s female disapproval numbers are unfavorable, sky-high. I mean, they’re so close to Trump, you can’t even tell the difference. And she’s only gotten positive media coverage. And we’re being told that Hillary’s inevitable, despite her unfavorables. But then you go to Trump or Cruz or anybody else on the Republican side — by the way, Cruz, you know, I watched the town hall meetings last night on Fox. I just feel so sorry for Greta. She drew a Kasich in these things.
But Cruz was excellent last night. Cruz was conversational. He had some of the best answers you would possibly want to hear on the question of abortion. Some woman stood up and basically said she was afraid. “I’m afraid of you, Senator Cruz, I’m afraid you want to make abortion illegal and put me in jail or some such thing.” He just had a perfect answer for it. And Scott Walker came on the last 20 minutes — it was Megyn Kelly that did that hour. And then Hannity did Trump an hour later, who went out with Melania and I’m sure part of that is to blunt this unfavorable number with women that Trump has.
But the disparities here are striking, and they’ve always existed and they always will. And that’s why I think the unfavorables for Hillary aren’t gonna matter ’cause they’ve got it wired for her, despite the fact that Bernie keeps winning states. The Democrats, they’ve got more problems than they know, and they probably do know the problems they have. They have just a dead campaign going. Hillary Clinton doesn’t excite anybody.
The only excitement in that campaign is Bernie Sanders, and Bernie supporters are starting to get the idea that no matter how well he does, no matter how much money he raises, that none of it’s gonna matter, that Hillary’s gonna be the pick. They’re starting to figure out here that they don’t have a voice in the Democrat Party. And everybody’s talking about, “Well, you know, if Trump doesn’t get the nomination, if the GOP steals it from Trump, his voters are gonna just go away.”
What about Crazy Bernie’s voters? You think they’re just gonna snap to and say, “Okay, yeah, well, our guy lost in a fair fight. We appreciate the Democrat Party ran a fair fight. We gave Bernie every chance.” You think they’re just gonna gut it up and join forces with Hillary? The odds are that they will, that’s what everybody thinks, because their common enemy, us, is what will unite them. But, I’ll tell you, there’s some people on the Democrat side just as ticked off with the establishment for their own reasons as there are on the Republican side. But in the coverage here, you never you never have any of the similarities.
You know, they love to harp on whatever unfavorables Cruz has. You know, whatever polling data negative there is about Cruz, oh, man, talking about how Cruz, he might be able to win the nomination but he’s never gonna be elected president. He can’t be, he’s this, he’s that. They say the same thing about Trump and the thing is somebody’s gonna win it, and I think it’s gonna be one of those two guys, unless the establishment pulls a rabbit out of their hat, which they’re gonna try to do, make no mistake about it.