RUSH: We have been waiting for so-called scientific polling data after the debate on Monday night to assess the impact of that debate. As you know, there are a whole bunch of flash polls afterwards. There was the Drudge poll; there was the TIME magazine poll; a bunch of local TV and newspaper polls. And, in every one of those flash polls, Trump just kicked rear end. But in the CNN flash poll afterwards it was Hillary that won big, 62-27. While people were celebrating the flash poll victory for Trump, there were others saying, “Wait, wait, wait!

“Wait until the actual polls, not just people that can go on the internet and vote countless times. Let’s wait until we get some data.” So the data started trickling in yesterday, and the first poll indicated Hillary was a clear winner. I think it was Monmouth? No. It was Morning Consult yesterday. The Morning Consult poll came in yesterday and Hillary was the clear winner, but the take-away from the poll was that only 9% of the respondents of the poll said that the debate would like have any effect on ’em changing their minds.

Some people think 9% is a big number. Some people think it’s not that big considering the importance people attach to debates. It depends on how you look at it. So you have a big, monster debate with 80 million people or whatever the audience was, and 9% of the people watching (if we believe this poll) said, “Yeah, it might have changed my mind.” That could be: 9% of 80 million, that’s not an insignificant number.

The analysis of that poll also included the fact that despite Trump having lost it, it didn’t seem to be significant enough or a powerful enough loss to derail his momentum. I think we have evidence of that by virtue of what the Clinton campaign did coming out of that debate. You would think if they thought they won that thing hands down/slam dunk that they would start hammering Trump on a number of things that include issues, and instead they bring up this former porn star and this whole sordid thing that happened 20 years with the Miss Universe Pageant.

The Clinton campaign just doesn’t want to get anywhere near issues. They just can’t. There’s not a single issue out there on which they can win. Obamacare’s falling apart. Trump needs to start reminding people of this! The economy’s revised growth is down from 1.2% to 1.3% or 1.3% to 1.4%. It’s basically nothing. There is no economic growth taking place! We still have massive immigration problems. There’s all kinds of substantive, issue-oriented things that got Trump where he is that the Clinton campaign doesn’t want to talk about.

Now, we’ve got two more polls here, and in both of them Hillary wins big. Reuters/Ipsos. What are the numbers here? Gotta dig deep. Fifty-six percent of the American people watching the debate thought that Hillary did a better job than Trump. Twenty-six percent thought that Trump did the better job. Now, this also is an online poll, but it is considered to be more scientific than the flash polls that took place immediately after the debate. I don’t know why. SurveyMonkey is the next poll: 52% thought Clinton won and 21% thought Trump did.

Okay. I want a reality check here. It depends on how you look at the polls. We have discussed this. You just can’t throw out the polls you don’t like and accept the polls that you do. You’re not helping yourself if you do that. So we have three scientific, quasi-scientific polls, admittedly from the Drive-By Media, and they all are pretty close. Hillary 55%, Trump 21% to 26%, somewhere in there. On the Trump side, if you listen to him, Trump thinks he won. Trump cites the flash polls afterwards.

I’m sure he sees them; I’m sure he appreciates them.

But clearly, as many of you know — because I think I heard from all of you — there were hanging curveballs that Trump missed. I mean, there were golden opportunities. I made the point, “Well, how important really was it for Trump to mention all these things when you already know it?” You know enough that he didn’t mention it, and a caller said yesterday, “Yeah, but that’s not the point, Rush. Yeah, we know it, but how many of these low-information crowd people are watching who don’t know it that could have benefited from Trump pointing out some of these things out about Hillary?”

It’s a great point.

So what’s gonna happen inside the Trump campaign with this knowledge?

I don’t know, ’cause I’m not there. Do they have to convince Trump, “Donald, you didn’t win,” and if they’ve gotta do that, who does it? Who walks in making sure there are no knives or sharp objects and says, “Donald, you didn’t win the debate.” And then does Donald Trump believe it and think that he can do better, or not? We don’t know. But that’s gonna have to… He’s got to get better in the second debate. Don’t panic over this. That’s why there are three. There’s plenty of opportunity to get better, and I think getting better is really nothing more than becoming more at ease and rationing your energy level.

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RUSH: Okay. A little more data from these two polls. I just got a funny email: “Hey, Rush, you know, if a pollster called me the night of the debate I’d probably say that Hillary won, too, if I wanted to live.” Yeah, yeah, I know all of those things are factors here, and I know that a number of people, no matter what the polls say, because they can see what the media is doing with this Alicia Machado thing, you just don’t trust them. You don’t trust their polls, you don’t trust them. I totally understand. It’s just that you want to be right about this.

I mean, you can’t look at that debate, you can’t look at that debate and say that Trump was who he really normally is. You can’t say that he hit a grand-slam home run. You can analyze it and say, “Yeah, he didn’t do as well as we hoped, and it probably isn’t gonna hurt him, but he could have done better.” Now, everybody can do better every time they do anything; let’s acknowledge that. But that’s not what I’m talking about. He could have been better in a number of ways. And you should want him to be.

This is very, very important, and I think Trump owes it to the people who have supported him to give it his best in these circumstances, and it really depends on, you know, what his own impression of the debate was, what his real own impression was. He wants to win. I mean, that’s his personifier, the identity of his personality. He wants to win, he is a winner, and he will focus on that, so that is a positive sign.

You go to the internals of some of these polls, like here’s the Reuters/Ipsos poll, and this poll, by the way, has shown Trump pulling ahead in the last three weeks, pulling even and then pulling ahead right at the margin of error. This poll had Hillary up by 12, I think, or nine coming out of her convention. “Some 31 percent of likely voters said the debate improved Clinton’s chances of winning the White House, while 16 percent said the debate benefited Trump.

“Even so, Clinton’s performance seemed to have little impact on her support among America’s likely voters. The poll showed 42 percent supported Clinton while 38 percent supported Trump. Over the past few weeks Clinton has maintained a lead of between 4 and 6 points over Trump.”

So there was no bump among likely voters in the Reuters/Ipsos poll. So that’s good. In all of these Drive-By Media polls, the Democrats are widely oversampled, by the way. It has been noted. In some cases, like the CNN poll after the debate, had a sample where the Democrats were plus 15. There was a 15% oversampling of Democrats. Well, naturally you’re gonna get a result that shows Hillary winning. Now, the reason CNN says they did that’s ’cause they took a guesstimate as to who was watching, and they assumed that more Democrats were watching. I mean, they claim they’ve got scientific reasons for all of this analysis.

But don’t forget this. We had the story last week. Somebody gave the results of one poll that details, that crosstabs everything, one poll to five different pollsters, and five different pollsters each came up with five different takes on the same data. The differences were not wildly out of proportion, but in two of the three Trump was judged to be the winner in the polling data analysis and Hillary the winner in the other three.

So a lot of it is how the pollster analyzes the data that the pollster gets. So the CNN poll oversampled Democrats by 15%. The Reuters poll, Ipsos poll here, has Democrats oversampled by 11, and the Public Policy Polling poll has Democrats oversampled by nine, even though Democrat turnout in past elections has not exceeded the Republicans’ by anywhere near those numbers.

This is the Reuters story. They’re worried, by the way, when you read the Reuters story, about the poll that Hillary won the debate, listen to this. “One possible reason for the lack of movement in Hillary’s support is that it usually takes several days to measure the full impact of a single event.” So while everybody came out of that debate trashing the flash polls as irrelevant and unrealistic, here we have a scientific poll from Reuters/Ipsos and it shows Hillary the winner, but by not enough. It doesn’t show the victory Hillary had powerful enough to change any minds, to switch the momentum. And so Reuters is left to make excuses for her after reporting she won.

“One possible reason for the lack of movement in Hillary’s support is that it usually takes several days to measure the full impact of a single event.” Why does it take several days and an Alicia Machado? Because it takes awhile for the Drive-Bys, in their postdebate reporting, to convince everybody who won. That’s why it takes a few days. The Drive-Bys are not happy with the initial results in the Reuters/Ipsos poll, so they say, “Well, you know, it takes a couple days, three days before we actually have the impact sink in.” What that means is “two or three days before we can write the stories that tell everybody what a rotten louse Trump is and how badly he did.”

Now, the next poll is the SurveyMonkey poll. This is an online poll as well, but their sample is random, not self-selecting. And what that means is that all these online flash polls anybody can be in the sample. All you’ve gotta do is go to the website and click on who you think won and you’re in the sample. That’s self-selecting. The pollster has no say so over who the sample is. But SurveyMonkey, after they have everybody vote then starts doing what they claim is their official pollster magic, to turn this massive database of participants into a reasonable sample.

They choose several thousand people among the millions who take other polls every day, and they ask them for feedback, and then they weight the results accordingly to try to mirror the demographics of the country. Their methodology is explained in detail in a little link here accompanying this story. And what the people at SurveyMonkey say they’re trying to gauge is national opinion what it looks like.

So in the SurveyMonkey poll, what do we have, 52% thought that Clinton won the debate. Twenty-one percent thought that Trump did. Clinton did do better than Trump in terms of temperament, but even Hillary finished just 44-55 among independents on whether her temperament leaves her fit to serve or not. She did nothing to help herself with Republicans or independents in the debate, according to SurveyMonkey.

So it’s the second scientific poll in which she is declared the clear winner, but there’s nothing else to report. Her victory has not propelled her. It’s too soon to know. It’s gonna take two or three days for the impact to settle in on all of you and for the Drive-Bys to write their stories to help you figure out who won. That’s the way they look at it. But the upside here is that, even though Hillary won in these three scientific polls, she got no momentum out of it that they can find in the polling data.

Trump didn’t lose any ground. Hillary didn’t gain any ground. So essentially they can’t find any data, these three pollsters can’t find any data to suggest significant movement one way or the other on the part of either of these two candidates. So, what did appear to be a less-than-great performance by Trump, we can breathe a sigh of relief because there doesn’t seem to be any significant payment for it, no significant damage, and leaving the next debate wide open for significant improvement. That comes up on the 9th of October.

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RUSH: We’ve got some people who want to weigh in on this debate business. Also, I just came across a little one-page excerpt from Trump in his book, The Art of the Comeback, in which he writes about Alicia Machado shortly after he had purchased the Miss Universe pageant. It’s quite fascinating here. It’s very, very, very interesting. I’ll have that just a moment.

But here is Greg in Elmwood Park in New Jersey. Welcome, sir. How are you?

CALLER: Thank you, Rush, for taking my call. Just a quick comment on the debate. Hillary was at 100%. Trump wasn’t. Hillary will not be able to improve in the next debates; Trump will. I think the Democrats do have something to be afraid of.

RUSH: Well, yeah. Okay. There are any number of ways of analyzing the debate. I still stand by my take: Trump didn’t lose any of his supporters. He’s not gonna lose them no matter really what happens these debates unless, you know, he tells them he’s been lying to them all along, which is not gonna happen. The connection there is too deep. But I still stand by what I think is the most important aspect in analyzing all this, and that is Trump is the outsider, and Trump’s the…

How to put this? The way people measure Trump is not the way they’re gonna measure Hillary. Trump has no fingerprints on anything. Trump has not had a thing to do with anything in this country, good or bad, in terms of policy. He has nothing to do with it. Hillary’s fingerprints are all over everything, including everything that’s going wrong and has gone wrong. To try to judge Trump… This is where the Drive-Bys and the media are making the mistake, the Democrats, too.

They’re judging Trump as though he’s a lifelong politicians. He’s a lifetime, lifelong politician who has got all these personality characteristics that are deficits and traits that are not positive, and that’s not how his supporters look at him. They don’t care about this. That’s not why they support him, and so it’s a different rubric, and the Drive-Bys are missing it. They don’t have the ability to get outside the bubble that they’re in and to see Trump the way his supporters do, and that’s important because the Drive-Bys are trying to separate Trump from his supporters as much as they are trying to push Hillary.

They’re trying to convince some of you as they can that they’re wasting your vote and your time ’cause Trump’s not worth it. That’s what this Machado business is all about. And they don’t understand that they’re not gonna be able to do that. So if all they can do is affect the undecideds, well, they’ll take that, too. But there’s any number of ways of looking at the these debates, and I think Trump has more leeway in terms of less than a great performance than Hillary does.

I still think the challenge is always gonna be on Hillary. I think just the fact that Trump’s on the stage, he starts out with a plus. The guy has never done this before. It’s truly an invasion. Donald Trump represents the invasion of a very, very closeted and closed club that is very, very hard to get into. He’s crashed in and has got all of them quaking in their boots. I appreciate the call, Greg.

This is Jane in Bethel, Maine. Great to have you on the program. Hi.

CALLER: Hi. How are you?

RUSH: Very good, thanks.

CALLER: Thank you for taking my call. What I’d like to say is that I hope in the next debate when Hillary starts trashing and bashing Mr. Trump, that he comes back with some kind of a line that, “There you go. You’re more interested in talking about me instead of talking about what you are going to do for the country.”

RUSH: Can you give me an example when that happened that you are frustrated that Trump didn’t react to it?

CALLER: Well, you know, when she starts talking to him about bashing women and so forth, it’s… You know, I don’t want to hear that. I don’t care about that.

RUSH: Let me ask you this. Jane, let me ask you very seriously. When Hillary started in on Trump and the lack of making his taxes public, the fact that he will not release his tax returns, and she started listing a number of potential reasons why, she went down the list. “Maybe he doesn’t have the money he wants you to think he has. Maybe he’s not as rich. Maybe he doesn’t give as much money to charity. Maybe he’s filed a whole bunch of bankruptcies. Maybe he…” Any number of things. Did you think — did you hope — Trump would respond to any of those things?

CALLER: I didn’t care about that. I was in banking for 30 years, and I did mortgage lending and commercial lending and consumer lending. And the one thing that… Tax returns, they don’t tell you very much at all. You learn more from your financial statement than you do your tax return. Your tax returns, they tell you how much you pay or what percentage you’re in, but I don’t care about that. I could care less about his tax returns because I know he’s a businessman; I know what he’s done for himself. He’s a man that obviously has high ethics. You look at his family, and he’s brought up great children, and when you see the success that he’s had, that’s what we need in this country. We need somebody that wants to lead, somebody that wants to win, and somebody that knows how to make a dollar and create a job.

RUSH: I understand all that. I’m just asking: You’re a Trump supporter, and here goes Hillary trying to capitalize on the fact that Trump will not release his tax returns. And she starts listing all of these reasons why. He’s a liar, he’s not as rich as he says —

CALLER: Yep.

RUSH: — he hasn’t given as much to charity —

CALLER: Yep.

RUSH: — or paid any taxes. Are you telling me that not once in that segment you wanted him to fire back at her?

CALLER: Oh, I did, but I would like him to do it in an eloquent way. But we all know how he is. There’s ways that he could just bury her right into the ground, to squash her. But, you know, he didn’t do it. And I think, you know, some of that might have been nerves because it was his first debate facing her. But I do think he will do better in the second debate, and I hope he takes advantage of some of these situations if she decides to bring it up.

RUSH: Well, I tell you, one thing I know is gonna happen… I don’t know it. When I say “I think I know” it’s ’cause I’m pretty confident of it. When I heard Trump after the debate, he tweeted out, “There weren’t any questions on Benghazi. There weren’t any questions on the foundation. There weren’t any questions on this.” I said, “That’s right. You gonna have to bring that stuff up yourself. You think Lester Holt’s gonna ask you about that? Lester Holt is not gonna ask Hillary about Benghazi and four dead Americans. He’s not gonna ask her about her email server. You’re gonna have to bring those things up,” and I think that’ll happen.

I can’t believe Trump was waiting for it in the first place.

But if he was, if he was waiting for it… They knew what the topics were gonna be. There were three or four different topics, you know, broadly identified. But I think that’s one of the things. Remember back to Obama and Romney and the last debate. Obama ended up with a hanging curveball on Benghazi, and Romney decided not to go there because Romney thought he already had it wrapped up, and then Candy Crowley later in the debate gave the lesson for Lester Holt on how to do it when it was his turn four years later. So he’s gonna have to do those things and go into those areas himself rather than wait, and I think that he will.