RUSH: I got an email last night from Salena Zito, who has made a name for herself by traveling through all of these blue states during the election campaign season of 2016. She went to all of these places in blue states that were going to vote for Trump.
And she learned everything about these people she could. She took them seriously. She went and met them and talked to them, learned about them. Nobody else in the Drive-By Media has done anything like this. But she wanted to find out who they are. She lives in Pittsburgh. She had a sense that something was happening out there that the Washington establishment didn’t see, and rather than guess, she actually wanted to find out who these people are.
She went to a lot of small towns, medium size towns, spent serious time there getting to know these people. She has stayed in touch with them ever since the election. She has written a book about it. If the Democrats and the media wanted to know who it is that voted for Donald Trump, all they’d have to do is go get her book. They haven’t. They don’t read it. They don’t care to know who the Trump voters are. They’re not interested in appealing to them.
They’re trying to find out ways to make Trump voters irrelevant or keep them away from the polls. They want to separate Trump and his voters from themselves, but they’re not interested in finding out who they are so as to maybe convert them to Never Trumpers or anti-Trumpers. It’s an amazing display of arrogance. And, by the way, the same can be said of Republican political consultants. They don’t care who the Trump voters are. All that matters is that they are laughed at, impugned, and made fun of.
So I get a note from her last night, and she is explaining to me what the Kavanaugh hearings have meant and what has happened out there in these areas she has studied. She made, essentially, two points. One, that something has needed to happen after the 2016 election to keep the coalition that voted for Trump together. Now, a lot of us have assumed that if people voted for Trump in 2016, that they did so for very specific reasons, among them Trump is alone in fighting the Washington establishment, that Trump is alone in pushing back against Democrats and the so-called Washington conventional wisdom.
And then the assumption is that if people knew that in 2016, that they would not forget that and that they would realize the need to continue to vote in ways that would continue to support and enable Trump to be successful! And she makes the point that it doesn’t work that way, sadly, that after a single election with the known result, something needs to happen besides just another election of party members where Trump is not on the ballot. Something needs to happen to make those people as eager to vote two years later as they did in 2016.
And that is the Kavanaugh circumstance, in her mind. “The conservative-populist coalition that elected Trump needed something outside of Trump to coalesce around in the midterms.” In other words, in her study of things, just continuing to vote for a party — Republicans — to enable Trump to keep going was not enough to get ’em out there. I don’t know why. I would think it would be. But she says it’s not.
“Kavanaugh, however, has provided the catalyst, because of how Trump voters — and specifically the conservative-populist coalition — perceive the way he has been treated. Not just by Democrats, but by the media and by Hollywood. That the Trump conservative-populist coalition is tired and worn out the way they and things they believe in are treated by Democrats, the media, and Hollywood. And her point is that the targets of rage had somewhat diminished until Kavanaugh came along and reawakened these people and fired them back up.
So she says, “This is what I see in a nutshell: What happened to Kavanaugh has served as a reminder and a highlight to the people that voted for Trump, why he’s successful, that it’s all about being strong. It helped remind voters why they supported him. Any other Republican president would have walked away from Kavanaugh by now. Energy would have been lost. But it’s not. Energy is high.”
Now, again, that’s Salena Zito and her analysis of the electorate today heading into the 2018 midterms. Now, where I… Look, she knows what she’s talking about. I find it strange that people who… I think the people that voted for Trump are deeply involved in things. Now, maybe there are some exceptions and you had some people that voted for Trump who were just fed up with Republicans and Democrats and found Trump interesting.
But for the most part, I am of the opinion that Trump voters did so for very, very, very specific reasons related to Trump’s agenda, which he pounded every day, multiple times a day. Donald Trump told everybody was he was gonna do: Trade deals, the wall, immigration, rebuild the military, bring back the economy. I would think people that voted for Trump knew that that’s what he’s gonna do, and I would also think that people voted for Trump would realize that he needed more than two years to do it.
But it’s her insistence, no, that kind of stuff; it evaporates and wanes.
You know, people’s lives go on, the news changes, but that this Kavanaugh circus “has reignited the coalition that elected Trump, and this is to the detriment of the Democrats who don’t see this happening.” She says the Senate could indeed see a red wave. The House, she’s not so sure of. I found it interesting analysis, and I wanted to share it with you. She points out the Democrats spending money in House races out there like we’ve never seen before, and the Republicans aren’t.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I meant to mention something earlier in my sharing with you the information Salena Zito shared with me in an email last night about how the Kavanaugh situation has revitalized the Trump populist coalition. It was the Trump populist coalition that was assumed to be not all that enthusiastic about voting ’cause they did that in 2016 and Trump won. But now Kavanaugh and this whole thing has reinvigorated ’em.
In her note to me, she said, “There could well be a red wave in the Senate. The House, it’s too soon to say. The Democrats could win the House, Rush.” And she said, “Because they’re spending money like you can’t believe in these local races. The Republicans outraise them, but when you get into local district House races, the Republicans in many of these races’ districts are being dwarfed, and it made me stop and realize something.
How many of you…? Let me just ask you something. How many of you have ever made up your mind on who to vote for based on a TV ad? I never have! Now, I don’t watch local TV that much, but I know that I am not a good example of a cross section of the country. A lot of people watch local TV and, as such, are inundated with political ads. And we keep hearing that people are tired of them.
But they keep running ’em because the political consultants believe that they work. But this is an area where I don’t have a lot in common with the people in this regard. And it leads to being a constant frustration for me. I am never influenced by the money spent on a campaign, particularly campaign ads. It doesn’t affect me. I know who I’m gonna vote for before I see an ad. And there’s not an ad in the world that’s gonna make me the change my mind.
Folks, I really mean it. I think, given what we’ve seen since Trump was elected, the Democrat Party and the deep state deserve the biggest electoral landslide loss ever. This country needs to rise up and reject these people. I know their voters are not gonna reject ’em, but I don’t believe they’re the majority. I think these people need to be skunked. Their behavior is, in terms of decency, common decency, these people must not be rewarded for what they’re doing!
Destroying people, destroying institutions, destroying concepts in our rule of law. I shudder to think of them being rewarded for this stuff. You know, it used to be that you knew the economy was great just by living through it. But now you apparently have to be told that it’s good. You have to be watching TV and then somebody on TV has to tell you the economy is good, then you have to believe it.
Well, I remember a time where when the economy was roaring along and people were doing well, you didn’t need to be told. You knew it. But now we’ve got the Democrat Party out there saying it’s not a great economy, tax cuts are ruining everything. And some dummkopfs believe this stuff! You reject what you’re living and believe what you’re being told by people. So I just, I have yet to be influenced by a political ad.
Now, I realize I’m very firm in my convictions, and I know what I believe, and there’s not an ad in the world that’s gonna change my mind about a candidate.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Also, the money Democrats are spending is being spent on people to go door-to-door to pretend to be neighbors and say, “Man, we really like such-and-such. You gotta join us.” They may be spending more on that than they are TV ads.
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