RUSH: So, to summarize in the Economist/YouGov poll, Trump leads Biden by 6, Sanders by 26, Elizabeth Warren by 30, Pete Buttigieg by 41%. This is not a preference poll. It’s an electability poll. It’s voters, registered voters being asked, “Okay. In this matchup, who wins? That matchup, who wins?” It’s not a, “Who are you gonna vote for, who do you want to vote for, who do you want to see win.” It’s what do people think.

And these margins, as I’ve said, make sense to me because the Democrats are offering nothing. We live in undeniably economically prosperous times. In fact, there’s a slogan that has long been a slogan desired to be true by every politician, every president since the beginning of time, and that is peace and prosperity. Donald Trump is the first American president in our lifetimes who has not started a war. He’s inherited some, and he may have expanded our involvement, but he’s not started one.

Wars are started for economic reasons, in part. They are started for legitimate strategic reasons, but he’s the first one who hasn’t. At the same time, we have an economy that many people alive have never experienced before and, as I have made clear, eight years prior to Trump’s three years the American people were hearing things like this was never gonna happen again, that they were not possible, that this kind of prosperity, employment, job opportunity, none of this was possible.

The Democrat Party, that was their message, as they were leading the country. Now, they do this for a host of reasons. They want people depressed and dispirited. They want people thinking they can’t get anywhere on their own. They want people to be victims. They want people to believe that there are invisible, mysterious forces keeping them down, making it impossible for them to advance in life.

And guess what? It just so happens that most of these invisible, powerful forces can be linked to Republicans, say the Democrats. I’ve been a conservative all of my life. I was born one. I grew up as one. I did not have to be taught. I did not have to have it ingrained in me. I just naturally am and was. And as I grew older, I learned why I thought what I thought. I learned how to explain what I thought, and I learned how to persuade other people.

I’ve had repeated attempts made to try to talk me out of it, and they’ve all failed. As such, I’ve grown up believing that the answer to reconstituting America, as founded, always resided in conservatism. Conservative ideology, conservative policies, conservative values, conservative language, conservative morality. And there have always been my entire life, there have always been noted, learned conservative intellectuals and others who set themselves up as powerful and influential enough to make it all happen.

And it took me a while to realize that every damn one of them was asking for donations in order to do what they do, and it took me awhile to figure out that conservatives don’t run around asking people for money. And yet all of these leading conservatives, conservative organizations, conservative individuals were thriving and surviving off of donors, just like everybody else in Washington. Donations, cruises, fundraisers. I’ve never asked anybody for a dime in my life. I never would. It goes against my very makeup.

And then if you add conservative principles to it, conservatives believe in self-reliance, they believe in self-advancement, rugged individualism, all of that. So we’ve had over the course of my lifetime one legitimate conservative individual that got elected and indeed did great things. That was Ronaldus Magnus. Outside of that we haven’t had any. Yet all this time we’ve had numerous conservative institutions, whatever you want to call them, think tanks, what have you.

And, by the way, full disclosure, when I first started this program 31 years ago, I made sure when I started, to thank them. I was the new kid on the block. These people had never heard of me. In my view, they had been toiling in the basement, figuratively, working in obscurity and anonymity, developing conservative theory and philosophy.

And here comes some kid out of California that didn’t even go to college and all of a sudden is becoming this widely famous and well-known conservative who is articulating it all, and I don’t have the pedigree these people have. So initially they looked at me very warily. They eyed me suspiciously. So I made it a point to thank them all for their contributions to my understanding.

And then the requests started coming to help them raise money, and I did. I thought that was what was necessary. The short version of this story is that after and before Ronald Reagan, we’ve had nobody from the, quote, unquote, movement that ever got elected despite all of this influence, despite all this fundraising, and yet we now have Donald Trump, who is doing more for conservatism — and he isn’t one — than any conservative prior to him with the exception of Ronaldus Magnus.

And Donald Trump’s not asked anybody for a dime, and he doesn’t — well, campaign contributions. But even in 2016 there wasn’t much fundraising. He was self-funded. The fund-raising didn’t start ’til he won and set up the inauguration and transition and this kind of stuff, and there were some donations, obviously. But it was not the usual fare.

My point is that not only are the Democrats in shell shock over what’s happened, so is the entire Republican establishment. Some guy has come out of nowhere — well, I mean they knew who he was. He was a television star, a construction guy. Nobody ever took him seriously as anything other than a Page Six celebrity who built buildings. And now he’s running rings around the entire Washington political establishment.

We have economic circumstances that we were told 11 years ago and seven years ago that were not possible to attain anymore. We were told America’s shining days were behind us. We were also told that some of those great days were not legitimate because America is unjust. Socially unjust, economically unfair, maybe a tinge racist still and all of that.

We were told as a population to temper our expectations economically. The Democrats like people thinking they have no control over their own lives, then those people are more than willing to turn over such control to Democrats. So the Democrats try to make victims out of as many people as they can, and they do their best to convince people that there’s no hope, and last night’s Democrat debate was just filled with this.

Now, in times where our economy has been floundering and unemployment has been high — people losing their jobs, people being laid off, factories closing — that kind of rhetoric resonates.  But it’s not resonating now.  People are listening to it like some kind of foreign language.  I don’t deny that there are people in various degrees of misfortune in the country.  That’s gonna always be the case.  But the Democrats want you to believe that the entire country is a deep, dark, desolate place because of Republicans — and as long as there are Republicans, people have no future.

Well, it is just the exact opposite.  So the Democrats keep harping on all this — negativism, pessimism, defeatism — and while they’re doing that, they’re trying to destroy the guy 63 million Americans elected and probably many millions more are gonna vote for again. And their line just isn’t resonating with people right now, and it’s not hard to understand why.  So the margins in these polls make perfect sense to me, folks.

The margin in this YouGov electability poll with Trump beating Biden by 6, Crazy Bernie by 26, Elizabeth Warren by 30, Mayor Pete (come on) by 41, I can believe them.  The Democrat Party offers nothing.  They’re not even offering any hope!  The only hope they’re offering is if you elect them.  They don’t believe people have the ability to rise up.  They don’t believe people have the ability to live their own lives productively, to manage them.  That’s part and parcel of liberalism and socialism, and the Democrats have that wrapped down pat.

But it’s just not gonna resonate in times like this where we have record low unemployment, record high wage advances and increases, record high per capita income, record high job opportunity, jobs coming back that the previous Democrat president assured us could not come back — and that’s just half of it.  Now we’ve got a makeover of the federal judiciary underway because of Donald Trump.  We have a reworking of trade deals that put the American people at a great disadvantage being reworked.  I find it just fascinating that it’s all being done by a guy who never ran around once calling himself a conservative.  Still doesn’t.