RUSH: Pat Caddell, who worked for Jimmy Carter is on record this week as saying that this is starting to look like 1980 when Reagan came out of nowhere in the last week. He was down nine and ends up winning with a 10 state, 10% landslide. Caddell is on record, starting to feel like that. Well, Ed Rollins is joining Caddell in that. This is Neil Cavuto last night, and he says to Rollins, “Hey, Ed, what’s going on out there? Anything? What do you sense, Ed?”
ROLLINS: Yeah, definitely there’s a momentum shift, and you always want to be on the side of momentum. And my sense is it started before the FBI thing and very similar to Reagan in 1980. We were eight points behind. We went ahead after that debate and finished with a very strong finish.
CADDELL: Crowds were not the indicator. This race had been close. The reason I did not want to debate the last week before the election, I didn’t want to step on our incumbent momentum. Reagan helped himself enormously in that debate. Then the race kind of went back and forth for a couple days. By Saturday, the race was even. On Sunday, the race went to five points down; and on Monday night it went to 10 points down. There was something happening there, which is that once that we had been trying, as the Clinton campaign has been doing, we had pressed Reagan’s personality, those traits being too risky and being dangerous. What happened was a break took place in the perception of the election. Same thing here.
RUSH: All right. So what he’s trying to say is that the reason that they had the big shift in 1980 was that people stopped believing them, the Carter campaign when they are talking about how dangerous Reagan was, you can’t let this guy near the nuclear button. He’s a Hollywood actor. He’s not very bright, you know, this guy’s, he’s kind of bumbling and stumbling. You don’t want this guy anywhere near the levers of power. That began to change, Caddell says, the last weekend, and he says it’s the same thing that’s beginning to happen here. All of these things that people have been saying about Trump, they’re not working anymore. There’s more. Cavuto said, “So you think, Pat, you think Trump can do this?”
CADDELL: Yes. The other thing about these polls is the weighting problem is bad. The Washington Post poll with Trump ahead is still showing a ten-point party margin which I believe is twice as high as it’s likely to be. In which case you’re looking at a race where Trump really is probably in their polling four or five points ahead.
ROLLINS: It does feel like the closing days of ’80 with to me, Pat.
CADDELL: It does, too.
RUSH: That’s Ed Rollins. He ran Reagan in ’80. Carter and Caddell and Reagan and Rollins, and Caddell and Rollins, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re starting to feel the same thing we felt in ’80.” That’s what they’re saying. This other point that he made about the weighting problem in the polls, he’s right. In the Washington Post tracking poll, even now the one that Trump was up one yesterday and it’s dead even today, they have a 10% Democrat advantage in that poll, 37% Democrats, 27% Republicans. That is not changing.
There’s something else in these polls, I mentioned this in the first hour. I’ve got to mention it again. They have assumed, all of these pollsters have assumed that the black turnout will be similar to what it was for Obama in ’08 and ’12, and they have put that into their projections. If the black turnout’s the same, it votes for Hillary, what does that mean for our poll? But the black turnout may not approach those levels, which then further skews these results.
But you heard Caddell. He thinks this sample is 10% more Democrats than Republicans. That’s absurd. It’s more like three points, maybe four, you have 4%, 3% more Democrats than Republicans. If you do that you might find Trump plus four in this poll. Look, these are experts in it, they’ve been there, done that, take it for what it’s worth.