RUSH: This is almost predictable. Every two years and every four years in a presidential election I go to the e-mail, and of course the libs start writing, ‘Is that all you got to say? You always say the same thing. You’re just a broken record.’ Well, there’s a reason. Libs lose. And this election is going to come down to what every other election comes down to, and that’s turnout. It’s going to be what kind of grassroots organizations does McCain have versus Obama’s. Bruce Walker, writing at the AmericanThinker.com says the Battleground Poll and particularly question D3 is crucial to understand this country. He says, ‘I always zip past this data in the first fifteen pages of poll results,’ from the Battleground Poll. The Battleground poll, by the way, is the bipartisan poll, Ed Goeas on the Republican side, Celinda Lake on the Democrat side, and their questions never change. They’re consistent and it is a poll with a great track record.
So Mr. Walker says he always zips through all the mundane polling data, goes straight to question D3, ‘which very quietly and totally ignored proclaims the biggest missing story in American politics and which is the only story, in the long run, that really matters. I have been tracking Question D3 for a long time, since June 2002, in thirteen straight Battleground Poll results. Americans respond to this question more consistently than to any other question in those thirteen Battleground Poll surveys. People may change their opinions dramatically about Iraq or President Bush or drilling for oil, but not their answer to Question D3. The Battleground Poll is different. It is bipartisan. A Republican polling organization, the Tarrance Group, and a Democrat polling organization, Lake Research Partners, collaborate in picking the questions, selecting the sample population, conducting the surveys, and analyzing the results. The Battleground Poll website, along with the raw data, is ‘Republican Strategic Analysis’ and ‘Democratic Strategic Analysis.’ There are few polls that are bipartisan. No other polling organization asks the same questions year after year, none that reveal the internals of their poll results so completely, and none ask anything like Question D3 in every survey. What is Question D3 and what were the results to Question D3 in the August 20, 2008 Battleground Poll? It is this:
‘When thinking about politics and government, do you consider yourself to be… Very conservative, somewhat conservative, moderate, somewhat liberal, very liberal, unsure/refused. In August 2008, Americans answered that question this way: (1) 20% of Americans considered themselves to be very conservative; (2) 40% of Americans considered themselves to be somewhat conservative–‘ For those of you in Rio Linda, that adds up to 60% who consider themselves conservative. Two percent said they considered themselves to be moderate, the independents, the great moderates in American History. Two percent of the American people consider themselves to be moderates, and yet we’re told that they are 20% of the electorate. Twenty-seven percent said they were somewhat liberal, and 9% said they were very liberal. That’s a total of 36% to 60. Sixty percent conservative, 30% liberal. Question D3, Battleground Poll, five days ago. Three percent of Americans did not know or refused to answer.
Now, as Mr. Walker writes here: ‘Sixty percent of Americans considered themselves conservative. Does this mean that most Americans do not know what ‘conservative’ means? No: The question specifically provides an out to people who are not sure about their ideology; it provides an out to people who want to be considered ‘moderate.” If you don’t know that you’re conservative or liberal, you can always put moderate. Americans reject the choice of moderate. ‘They overwhelmingly define themselves as ‘conservative.’ This is a huge political story — except that it is not ‘new’ at all. Look at the thirteen Battleground Poll results over the last six years, and how do Americans answer that very question? Here are the percentages of Americans in those polls who call themselves ‘conservative’ since June 2002: 59% (June 2002 poll), 59% (September 2003 poll), 61% (April 2004 poll).’ It doesn’t vary. From 63 to 58% consider themselves conservative from 2002 on.
‘The percentage of Americans who define themselves as ‘somewhat liberal’ or ‘very liberal’ has always been puny. In thirteen straight polls, this percentage has never been higher than 38% (June 2004) and it has usually been much lower. The gap between self-defined conservatives and self-defined liberals has been as high as thirty percentage points and as low as twenty-one percentage points. What does that translate into in electoral politics? If conservative presidential candidates simply got all the conservative votes — if virtually all moderate voters, uncommitted voters, and liberal voters went for the liberal candidate — then the conservative candidates would win a landslide bigger than Ronald Reagan in 1988. Have you ever wondered why liberals like Obama never call themselves liberals?’ Why they want to be called conservatives? ‘Maybe their advisers have read the Battleground Poll internals,’ to question D3.
He goes on to say that these people in this poll are not pressured to answer in any particular way. It’s a bipartisan poll, a Republican and Democrat pollster, and no pressure is applied to anybody to answer in a specific way. ‘Why, then, do other polls show Americans so different from conservatives? The short answer is that other polls are scrupulously constructed to hide the tsunami of conservative opinion in America. On abortion, for example, polls will report that Americans define themselves at least as much ‘pro-choice’ as they do ‘pro-life,’ but that is just not true. The ‘pro-choice’ advocates nationally oppose bans on partial birth abortion, oppose parental notification, and oppose counseling on abortion. Led by men like Obama, the ‘pro-choice’ position is, quite simply, that a woman always has a right to choose an abortion. Polls do not show support for that at all,’ and he gives results. We’ll link to this at RushLimbaugh.com. This, ladies and gentlemen, explains quite a bit. ‘Like everything that the left does, from entertainment to higher education, the structure, the format, and the revealed results of information is conformed to present an image in which conservatives and their values are as invisible as blacks in the Antebellum South.’
This is why I have been so frustrated over the years when the Republican Party decides to go out and try to get the 2% of the American people that call themselves moderates and some of the 36% that call themselves liberals. When 60% of the American people since 2002 in the same poll have identified themselves as very conservative or somewhat conservative, it makes no sense for the Republican Party to abandon conservatives. It’s like Senator McCain. He’s putting on a big push for Mrs. Clinton’s voters right now, which I understand, because the Drive-Bys are full of stories about how angry Hillary’s voters are. But he wouldn’t even need them if he would reach out to conservatives the way he’s reaching out to the Clinton voters. There’s a reason Ronald Reagan won two landslides. It wasn’t marketing and packaging. It was the overall conservative majority of the American people found in a candidate one who was them. And it forever remains a mystery to me why the Republican Party wants to throw that aside, not only the blueprint, but the knowledge. It is as though their own polls do not get this answer right.
These polls obviously differ from any internal poll, from McCain’s camp to Obama’s camp. Why doesn’t Celinda Lake, for example, the Democrat in the Battleground Poll, why doesn’t she go out and warn the Obama campaign, ‘You don’t have a chance here. If McCain ever straightens out and goes full bore conservative, gets a full-bore conservative vice presidential running mate, you guys are going to be toast.’ There is a reason that there was so much enthusiasm for McCain after the Saddleback Church forum. It was the most conservative he had been. And you will note that the Drive-Bys knew it, and the Democrats knew it, the Obama camp knew it, ’cause it was move on fast to try to change the subject or shore up the sad performance. And so, folks, this is what is so frustrating to people like me who just instinctively understand where the American people are. By the way, if 60% of the American people are conservative and they say I’m preaching to the choir, it’s a pretty big choir.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Have you ever wondered, ladies and gentlemen, why the Democrat Party every four years tries to convince voters that they have values, that conservatives care about? Remember how stunned they were after the ’04 election when the exit polling data came out and they find out that ‘values voters’ thought the Democrats were just weak on all this? So for a week or so, ‘Yeah, we gotta shore up our image here on values,’ which meant they gotta find a way to lie to people and try to tell ’em they have the same kind of values they do, because the Democrat Party doesn’t. This country is not a liberal country. This country doesn’t like to lose wars. The majority of people in this country do not like hearing their country ripped and trashed by a presidential nominee on foreign soil or on domestic soil, and the values voters in this country are not going to be fooled by a convention show of values. And they’re not going to be fooled by Nancy Pelosi attempting to tell the people of this country that the church doesn’t believe what it believes. This is how they have to go about it. They’re sitting ducks, is the point. They are political sitting ducks if there ever became again a Republican Party with the courage and conviction to just go pedal-to-the-metal conservative.