RUSH: What, am I losing touch with what’s going on? I don’t know how that matters. I think Biden going to Kenosha has a whole lot of other ramifications to it besides whatever this guy that got shot did.

Anyway, we’re back, folks. Rush Limbaugh and the EIB Network. Great to have you here. The telephone number if you want to join us, 800-282-2882, and the email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.

I also heard something about Blake’s father, something strange. You know, there are all kinds of people out there who are trying to — I don’t know what they’re trying to do by pointing out what the Blakes’ past might be, criminal history or whatever. To me, it still doesn’t justify them getting shot. But Biden going in to Kenosha after telling everybody Trump shouldn’t have gone and that he wasn’t gonna go, and now Biden’s going to Kenosha, I mean, what it tells me is that Trump is doing the right things instinctively.

The Democrats are trying to manipulate Trump into not doing things in his best interests. Trump is not listening to them. He’s doing this stuff anyway. And after he does it and it works, then Biden and the Democrats figure they’ve gotta do the same stuff. So that’s why Biden’s going into Kenosha, because Trump had a successful visit there.

The reason they didn’t want Trump going to Kenosha, they didn’t want people to see the destruction that had taken place there. Just like for all those 60 days of riots in Portland, they didn’t want anybody to see that. They wanted to try to play that down for a while. Then after a while they couldn’t play it down because some conservatives with cameras started going out there and recording it. When that happened, then the powers that be started trying to blame it all on Trump, and that didn’t work.

Last week polling data, focus group data clearly showing that it was Democrats paying the price for riots and lootings and everything else destroying their cities. So they had to totally change their behavior and their philosophy about it, and you can see last Sunday, you could see the tsunami coming of them trying to blame Trump for the things that they are doing. Now, there’s polling data out here from TheHill.com. “Trump adds to lead in Georgia.”

Now, the polling that’s out there today is all over the place. It’s tough to make sense of it. The Fox News poll is just, in one way, it’s maddening. And don’t misunderstand. I don’t expect the Fox News poll to reflect the Fox News primetime programming. The Fox News poll, they take pride in that poll. That poll, they want that poll to be as independent of the programming that’s on Fox as it can be.

So if the Fox News poll comes back and shows all kinds of negatives for Donald Trump, they’re happy about it in a professional sense. You know, the people that run Fox know full well that primetime is full-fledged honest as the day is long conservative media, conservative ideological tone and everything else, influence. But the polling, these pollsters are very serious about their work, and they don’t want the polling to simply reflect the identity of the network.

And I’m sure the people ABC and CBS and NBC and the Wall Street Journal and New York Times would tell you the same thing. Fox News is no different. But the Fox audience has different expectations. The Fox audience expects the Fox News poll to be a little bit more honest or what they think is honest, or more sympathetic to Trump than the other polls are, and it isn’t.

Is it still poking along in there, Brian, or is it speed up? (interruption) Okay. All right.

Well, let’s look at some of this as a comparison. Georgia is basically not a swing state, so I’m assuming nobody’s spending much money on polling in Georgia, and yet after the Republican convention Trump’s numbers went up there. Now, what makes Georgia any different than North Carolina in its overall reaction to these two conventions? The North Carolina poll we cited yesterday had Trump up. The Fox poll has Trump down. North Carolina is a bluer state than Georgia, but the same effect should happen in North Carolina after the conventions, and it ought to be. But it isn’t.

Georgia after the conventions, Trump 47.8, Biden 40.5. Georgia before both conventions, Trump 47.4, Biden 44.5. So basically Trump held steady. He lost a half a point in Georgia after the conventions. Biden lost four and a half points. It’s a statistically significant change. Basically the Republicans consolidated behind Trump. They appeared to like the message from the convention, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It looks like the Republican convention made a big difference for Trump, but it didn’t for Biden.

Here’s another one from the Washington Examiner. “Dead heat. Trump erases Biden’s eight-point lead in Pennsylvania as blacks abandon Democrat Party.” Now, I’ve seen stories where it’s just the exact opposite today, that Trump is having trouble in Pennsylvania, that Plugs has pulled ahead.

This story says: “Former Vice President Joe Biden, who calls himself ‘a kid from Scranton,’ has lost his wide lead over President Trump in his native Pennsylvania, where the 2020 presidential race is a dead heat. The latest Rasmussen Reports poll showed that both are tied at 46%. And, significantly, said the poll analysis, among the 82% of voters who said that they are ‘certain’ how they will vote, Trump holds a 51%-49% advantage. Rasmussen is the second poll in two days to show the race in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state, has become a tie. The Monmouth University Poll said Wednesday that Biden had a lead of 1 to 3 points.”

Now, the Fox poll has Biden winning Pennsylvania. This what I mean about it being all over the place. The Rasmussen poll, the Monmouth University poll, just the exact opposite. I know, I know, you’re all smirking out there, “Rush, what do you care? You’re the guy that tells us polling data right now doesn’t matter.” And I still believe that. It’s just that it’s so much a part of the news, you gotta talk about it.

And you remember, folks, when I said back in January, before COVID hit. January, February, even go to May. And then even in June, remember one of the things I said was that the events that are going to determine the outcome of the election in many ways haven’t even happened yet. I had a lot of people disagree with me, particularly after COVID because people said, “Ah, Rush, that’s big. COVID could be the sole determining factor.”

And, yeah, possibly, depending on what other things happen and depending what happens with COVID. If the publicized COVID death toll is a thousand people a day, a month away from the election then, yeah, the election’s gonna be about COVID. And it’s gonna be about how the people in charge at the moment are dealing with it. And then number two will be the economy. This is why the left is scared to death over Trump talking about this vaccine business and that it might be ready to go before November.

They send Fauci out (paraphrasing), “There’s no way. They may have a candidate or two, but I don’t see a vaccine being practical and applicable before the end of the year.” They’re doing whatever they can to dissuade anybody from believing that that much progress has been made this quickly on a vaccine. But, yeah, it could be the determining factor. And Trump knows this. The whole Trump campaign would know this.

In fact, in the traditions, American political traditions and presidential elections, it’s just the way it is. Whether it’s fair or not, a lot of people do not get into the issues of politics nearly to the degree you and I do. You’ve heard that only now are people actually beginning to start paying attention. And that’s traditionally true. Around Labor Day, after the conventions, that’s when people who have other things to do and other things on their mind, their world is not governed by politics, that’s when they start paying attention.

And one of the other little factoids — and it’s not always true, but the incumbent party is really a prisoner or a beneficiary of currency. Whatever’s happening now. So if the economy is tanking or if there’s big trouble in the economy, that’s all that will matter. Not why. People are not gonna say, “Well, it was going great but then the virus came along, we had to shut down and so Trump shouldn’t be blamed.” They don’t get into it in that degree of detail.

They have to be told. They can understand it, but they have to be told. It has to be part of a campaign. You engage in that, you run the risk, if you’re the Trump people, of being or sounding defensive about it. You don’t want to sound, “Hey, it was going great, man, it was going great, and then the virus, the China virus, and we had to shut it down, it’s not our fault, and was going great, we’re gonna do it again.” They have to be real careful about how they explain this. Because they do have the truth on their side.

The truth is in three years this economy was setting records and it was beneficiary to minority groups that had never had this kind of benefit before. African-American unemployment, historic all-time lows. Ditto Hispanics. Ditto women. Wages were going through the roof upwardly. More people working in the labor force than at any time in recent, 50-year history. Stock market, Main Street, the whole of the U.S. economy, manufacturing jobs had all come back.

And in two months, bye-bye. That’s all it took. Not even two months. Six weeks of shutting down the American economy and it’s all gone. Now, are most people gonna remember whether it’s November 3rd or whenever they vote, if it’s by mail, if it’s by absentee, if it’s by showing up at the polling place, are they going to go, “And, you know, Trump was really kicking butt in this economy and then the virus came along, and it’s not Trump’s fault.”

No. They’re gonna vote current circumstances. And the current circumstances are that we’re running out of unemployment compensation benefits, a lot of businesses are still not open. Some may never open, restaurants and so forth. And they’re gonna struggle to see the positives.

Even though they’re in the process, even though Trump’s doing a grand and great job of rebuilding. The left is keeping seven large states shut down that will retard national economic growth. Illinois, New York, Washington state, Oregon, any number of these places can have, if they’re combined, a negative impact on the national economy roaring back.

And then you throw COVID in there, and to me, folks, it is a monumental series of things that Trump has to overcome. He didn’t cause any of it. He didn’t cause the virus. He has saved America from the worst of the ravages. He didn’t create this economic mess. He actually set the economy up so strong that we have been able to withstand this assault on the economy and not be wiped out and destroyed.

But how many people are going to sit and deduce that on their own and even if you try to tell ’em are gonna agree with it and understand it? Just people are going to take stock of the way things are now. And the problem that we have is the Democrats, it’s gonna be tough to blame them for anything that’s going on now because they are not in power in Washington other than at the House of Representatives.

So this is a monumental campaign task that Trump has. It’s why he needs all the support from all of us that you can possibly muster. It’s why you can’t take for granted that Biden is going to be seen as the senile, incompetent Trojan horse that he is. Even though all of that is true, it’s going to take massive, active support for Trump. He’s got a profoundly difficult set of circumstances to overcome here. And he’s a prisoner to them and has had nothing to do with why things are the way they are.

In fact, let me say again, if he hadn’t had such robust success in reigniting and rebuilding the United States economy, I don’t know if the country would have been able to withstand the impact of COVID and the shutdown. We still have a fighting chance of rebuilding and coming back stronger than we are, and that’s only because of the foundation that Trump established in the first economic rebirth of the first three years of his administration.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: No, no, no. I was not being negative. I’m not being pessimistic. I’m being realistic here, and there’s plenty of time for all of this to change. My point is that there are a lot of days left before this campaign, before the election, and there’s any number of things that can happen that will totally change the way people are thinking about it.

This election is not by any stretch cast in stone yet, it’s not in any way etched in stone, and do not doubt me on this.

The Trump people understand it.