RUSH: Now, as to this TheHill.com story, “Poll: Nearly Half of Voters Think Trump Will Detonate a Nuke.”  Now, that’s clearly ludicrous.  They said the same thing about Reagan, folks.  You know, I’ll tell you something else.  And this is gonna really irritate some of the Never Trumpers out there on our side.  Some of the early supporters of Trump, such as Jeff Lord who writes for the American Spectator, when I first learned that he was for Trump, I was surprised.  And I asked him, “Why?” 

He said, “Rush, I’m sorry, I see so many similarities in Ronald Reagan.” 

I said, “You are kidding me.” 

He said, “Nope, I’m not.”  But he was drawing these comparisons between Trump and Reagan, not to Reagan the president, but Reagan the candidate, Reagan the governor, Reagan climbing the ladder. Not comparing Trump to Reagan the president, but rather where both were at the same point in their political objective.  Trump’s political career is still in its infancy, and Reagan’s wasn’t, but I’ve heard other people make similar comparisons to Trump and Reagan in the sense that they have the ability to go beyond the media. They have the ability to connect with people without having to have the media spread their word and carry their message.  That’s true. 

And now this repetition of the media and Democrat attack lines. “Oh, yeah.  Trump, he’s gonna push the button.  We can’t trust Trump with the nuclear arsenal.”  It’s exactly what they said about Reagan.  And I’m starting to see more and more of these comparisons.  Trump does have whatever it is on TV.  He’s one of these people that has the ability to dominate the screen and make people want to continue to watch, whether they know what’s coming or not.  Hillary doesn’t have any of that.  Quite the contrary.

The more Hillary shows up, the worse it gets for her polling-wise. The more she speaks, the worse her numbers get. So what does each candidate have to do in order to be perceived as winning?  And there are any number of ways to answer this that do not include knocking it out of the park, that do not include hitting a grand slam. 

Also on this polling data business. Let me close the loop on that.  You know, we’ve talked about the Wilder Effect, which is people telling the pollsters that they’re going to vote for an African-American candidate just so the pollster won’t think they’re racist and won’t argue with them. But when they actually vote, they don’t vote for the black guy. 

That’s the Wilder Effect named after Doug Wilder, the former governor of Virginia.  It’s also named for Tom Bradley, the former African-American mayor of Los Angeles.  And there’s said to be a Trump Effect, that there’s a lot of people, because of the media coverage, because of what they say about Trump, that people who want to vote for him are just embarrassed to say so, so they don’t.  And then the Democrats are pondering all these unknowns, all of these people out there who haven’t voted in a while who may be registering.  That’s an unknown number, and it’s not known what their energy level is and how many there are. 

But Peggy Noonan has a column today, and I can back this up; I’ve run into the same thing, too.  She says it is phenomenal the number of people she knows who are gonna vote for Trump who don’t want anybody to know it, establishment types, political types, people that travel in her universe, from the Hamptons, to Manhattan, to wherever.  But even when she’s traveling around just asking people that are not in the establishment, like at county fair type stuff, says she loves talking to strangers, and she asks them.

She says there’s so many people who will tell her that they’re voting for Trump but they don’t want anybody to know because there has been such a negative onslaught against Trump that there’s a, “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear people complaining. I don’t want people calling me stupid.”  She says it’s an incredible number.  So there is that effect going on with all of this, too.  None of that for Hillary.  There isn’t any closet Hillary vote out there.  So the dynamic, there’s so much going on on the Trump side, so many possibilities, ups and downs.  With Hillary, it’s just bleh, it’s just there, whatever that is.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Voters also think that Trump has more stamina than Hillary Clinton has, but even in this poll Hillary leads.  It’s a McClatchy poll, and the Reuters/Ipsos or NBC/Wall Street Journal has Hillary up significantly today, too.  Yet the gap is narrowing in Colorado, Virginia, and Trump has pulled ahead in Georgia, Iowa, according to Quinnipiac swing state poll.  So that’s what Peggy Noonan in her column — I’ll give you a pull quote.

“The most arresting sentence of the week came from a sophisticated Manhattan man friendly with all sides.” It sounds like your perfect moderate to me.  “I asked if he knows what he’ll do in November. ‘I know exactly,’ he said with some spirit. ‘I will be one of the 40 million who will deny, the day after the election, that they voted for him. But I will.'”  I’m gonna be one of the 40 million the day after the election that will deny I voted for Trump.  I’m gonna vote for Trump, but I’m gonna deny it the day after.  That is an interesting, curious way of expressing the sentiment for Trump out there. 

People are gonna vote for him, but they don’t want anybody to know, in Manhattan. I don’t know that it’s that profound everywhere, but that’s the way Peggy chooses to illustrate it.  It’s a column about how difficult it is to poll on this because so few people really want to be honest with you about their preference.