RUSH: Here’s Jeremy in Toledo as we start on the phones. I’m glad you called, sir. Great to have you with us.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, how are you?

RUSH: Very good. Thank you.

CALLER: Hey, I gotta tell you first off, I can’t begin to express to you what an honor it is to talk to you after being a listener for over 20 years.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, really very much.

CALLER: Nor can I express or do I think you’ll ever be able to truly understand everything you have done over the years means to me and millions of people like me, especially in the beginning when there was no place else to go but your show in this forum to be able to talk about the kind of things we talk about here.

RUSH: Well, I sincerely appreciate that, I really do, more than I have the ability to express. Thank you very much.

CALLER: Anyway, dittos just wasn’t gonna cut it. But I wanted to talk to you about the audio of the lady you were showing protesting the Romney event near Cleveland yesterday.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: I swear to you, I’m 95% certain that was the same lady that was at the Toledo lady, Romney rally, that I attended. I attended that yesterday, and when I watched our local news broadcast in the evening, they explained very briefly that the protesters that were there apparently were — you know, they were busing them around, chasing Romney around the state. Even at that there were only — and I counted ’em, and within two or three, there were 55 protesters there, and I guess one of the reasons I wanted to point that out is that’s encouraging to me that that’s, you know, all of the lack of enthusiasm for —

RUSH: It’s a standard technique. It’s a standard tactic. They do bus these people around. Now, this is video, this woman going on about how Obama gave her a phone. You think it’s the same woman you saw in Toledo?

CALLER: Oh, it certainly sounded like her, believe me. I unfortunately had the opportunity to listen to her gaping maw go on and on for several — well, for quite a while, while I was in line.

RUSH: All right, well, let me ask you this. You live in Ohio.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Fifty-five people being bussed around to protest Romney because if they weren’t being bussed around, there wouldn’t be any people protesting Romney. Do you believe that Obama’s up ten in that state where you live?

CALLER: No, no, as a matter of fact I’ve been following the polls very closely, and there’s a very stark difference between Rasmussen and the rest of them. I’ve been following that for quite a while, and I’m glad I finally heard you say yesterday, because I was trying to call early last week and point out the difference in these polls, you know, likely voters versus registered voters and the polling samples they’re using that seem to be way out of whack, and I guess what I wanted to point out to you and that I finally heard you say, I believe it was yesterday, is that, you know, one of the reasons they maybe doing this is for Obama to hedge his bets against an unfavorable election outcome. You know, him trying to lay the groundwork to claim voter fraud or something.

RUSH: Yeah, I think there are two things possible here. And, by the way, folks, let me explain to you, some of this sounds like it would be wildly conspiratorial. It’s all based on intelligence guided by experience. I’m not grasping things out of the sky or as the cliche goes, grasping at straws. This is stuff they’ve done. They try to charge voter fraud in every election. Hanging chads and all that in 2000, Gore here in Florida. It’s a standard operating procedure. Plus, I know these people. And I really wish that if everybody — not even everybody. I don’t know what number, but if so many more people could just see and understand liberalism for what it is, then this would be all over.

I’m no great sage. I’m no great Nostradamus. I just know liberals. And I know that they lie. I know that they have to lie. I know that they couldn’t get elected promising to do what they are going to do. You think Obama would have gotten elected if he woulda told you any of the policies he actually implemented? He wouldn’t have stood a prayer, even as the first black president. It would not have happened. If Obama told you that he had planned this debt, this spending, nationalized health care, if he had told you that, if he had told you there was gonna be this massive stimulus, if he woulda told you that he wouldn’ta cared whether the Republicans play along with him or not, he wouldn’ta seen the light of day.

They can’t be honest. They can’t run on their record. They lie. It’s no more complicated, and they coordinate with the media. We know that. That’s not a stretch. It’s not even a complaint. It’s a recognition of reality. So you have all these polls that show Obama running away with it. If he loses, they’ve got a built-in excuse to raise their rabble into a fitful protest over the fact election was stolen, something they’re entirely capable of doing.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So there’s a number of things going on with the polls, folks. Let’s review just quickly some things said yesterday. One of the reasons that you tout a big lead, at the same time early voting begins, is to suppress Romney early voters. Who wants to vote for a loser? Oh, gosh, here we go again. We really don’t have a chance. They know that so many people on our side, all you gotta do is listen to the average conservative pundit and realize that they’re mired in negativity and pessimism. So you build it up, put out a poll that shows a massive Obama lead and early voting goes on, and so you stoke Obama voters, you depress Romney voters. You convince the voters that your candidate’s so far ahead he can’t lose, then why waste your vote on a loser? And thanks to early voting, then the media can skew the polls early on and make the race suddenly tighter in the last weeks before Election Day to try to preserve their so-called credibility.

See, I firmly believe the polls are being used right now in a number of ways, but one, it’s a tie-in to early voting to get Obama votes out there, suppress Romney votes. Fundraising, too. And the third thing, just to repeat this again. You look at 2004 and how many John Kerry voters believed the exit polls that showed Kerry winning big. By the way, both the first two waves, two o’clock and five o’clock on Election Day 2004, John Kerry looked like he was gonna be elected president. The libs all bought it, and they were celebrating before the polls closed. The polls closed and the real votes started being counted, and the exit polls were horribly wrong. I mean, they weren’t just a little bit wrong; they were horribly wrong. And the result was that Democrats actually believed the exit polls and thought the real vote was fraudulent and wanted recounts and all kinds of stuff in Ohio.

So it doesn’t take a great sage to predict here what they do and what they’re capable of. So if you have all these liberals and all these Democrats believing these polls that Obama’s up in these swing states by eight to 12 points, and if he loses one or two of ’em, and loses the election, why, it’s an automatic conclusion. They’re going to think there was voter fraud. So that’s being set up as a possibility, too. This stuff is their life. Power, holding it, acquiring it, using it is their life. It isn’t ours. We want to win so that we can get this stuff out of our lives. They want to win so that it is everybody’s life, meaning government, and the people who deal with it.

Now, our discussion yesterday reverberated all across the media. We have some sound bite examples. Let’s go to The Five on Fox at five yesterday afternoon during a segment on the polls. Greg Gutfeld led off.

GUTFELD: I want to talk about Rush Limbaugh. He is talking about how the polls reflect the mind-set or the ideology of Democrats and not America as a whole. And then let’s take it from there.

RUSH ARCHIVE: The purpose of the people right now, most of them doing these polls, they’re trying to make news, not reflect it. They’re advancing an agenda. They’re all Democrats. They’re all liberals. They just have different jobs. The polls are the replacement refs. They’re watching, they see certain things, they don’t see other things. They don’t call certain things, and other things go by.

RUSH: Bob Beckel next.

BECKEL: No, they’re not all liberal Democrats. There’s plenty of Republican polling firms out there. Rush ought to stick to what he does very well, which is to be a radio talk show host, not try to second-guess pollsters. Look, you can argue about how these polls are reflected, and some will have a slight bias one way or slight bias the other. In the end, most of them turn out to be unbelievably accurate, not only in politics, but in a lot of other things. The amount of stuff that we depend on for polling is a lot in this country, in marketing and every other way. So I think that all these attacks on polls, if you’re not doing well in the polls, that’s the time you attack.

RUSH: Well, we ran through yesterday who ended up being the closest and the most accurate to the outcome in 2008. It was Rasmussen. The polls that we were talking about yesterday finished 18th, 19th, and 20th. They don’t get it right. They try to at the end of the day. Their last poll, last series of polls, last week, they try. That’s when their credibility is made. Nobody remembers the polls today after the election, although we might this year. There’s a good chance we will remember the polls this week after the election. But they don’t all get it right. Some of them are way, way off. You just don’t hear about it because they don’t report how bad they were. They don’t report how off they were, and everybody’s moved on. After the election, none of it matters. It’s not accurate to say that these people are all accurate and that they all get it close or get it right. They don’t. Dana Perino next on Fox.

PERINO: One of the complaints about the polls is the samples and that looking at who came out in 2008 to vote for President Obama will not be the same in 2012. And so some of the more conservative Republican pollsters are saying they are smoking something if they think it’s gonna be the same turnout in 2008. That is not the case, but the polling is using that same model, and that’s their complaint.

RUSH: That’s exactly right. Nobody believes that the Democrats are gonna show up in a plus seven or plus nine or plus 11 majority at the polls in November. It’s the Republicans who are energized. The Democrats are not. And polling shows that. So a poll that shows 11% or 9% more Democrats are gonna show up to vote than Republicans cannot be believed. That’s not gonna happen. And Rasmussen’s party identification survey, most recent, August 31st, shows that it’s plus four Republicans nationwide. Four percent more people identified themselves as Republicans than Democrats.

You note nobody’s using 2010, nobody is using the 2010 turnout as their sample. “Well, that’s right, Mr. Limbaugh, because that was not a presidential race.” Sure. We’re also gonna throw it out because it was a Democrat landslide loss all the way down the ballot. So we’re not dare gonna use that. Last night on Greta Van Susteren she had a panel on her show talking about the poll. Steve Hayes from the Weekly Standard was one, and she said, “‘Ignore it,’ that’s what Rush has to say about these swing states polls. Is Rush right? Are these polls slanted toward Democrats, toward Obama? Steve, first to you.”

HAYES: Yes. I think they oversample Democrats. I don’t think there’s any question about it. It would mean a record turnout for President Obama in those states to produce the kinds of results that we saw. Now, that doesn’t mean that these polls are useless. If there’s consistent oversampling inside a poll, like the CBS/New York Times poll has been pretty consistently, over the last three polls, plus eight or nine for Democrats. So you can see trends inside of that even if they’re oversampling.

RUSH: Now, there is, Inside the Beltway, a brotherhood, a fraternity, and a sorority, and very rarely will you see those Inside the Beltway — well, I take that back. The libs Inside the Beltway will go for the throat of our guys and try to destroy ’em. There’s a mutual respect. So the same time you rip them for having an outright crazy sample, you then say, “Well, but there’s a reason that they’re doing this, we can see it,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There’s a collegiality that exists that of course I and those of us outside Washington are not taken in by or not sucked into. So our comments are not softened or filtered. Here’s Michael Crowley. He is the TIME Magazine senior correspondent. And after Stephen Hayes said what you just heard him say, Crowley jumped in.

CROWLEY: Pollsters want to get it right. The idea that there’s a conspiracy — that they are trying to root for one side, that they’re trying to depress one side’s turnout — to me, it just doesn’t make sense. I just find it impossible to believe. They want to get it right. And, you know, these polls do suggest a margin, I think, that is pretty wide.

RUSH: Yeah, yeah. See, that’s the problem. They see a Democrat margin that’s pretty wide yet they don’t want to get it wrong. They don’t want to suppress the vote. Look, Mr. Crowley, with all due respect: We have seen too much out here. We see it each and every day. You do have a vested interest in the outcome of this, tremendously so. You have no interest in Mitt Romney winning this! That would be a disappointing thing to you.

The idea that you want to try to portray all you people who do this as having no interest in the outcome or interest in getting it right? You’re interested in winning, and you will use what’s at your disposal to facilitate victory — and we see it! We would be blind not to see it. It’s why I say the last poll or the last couple of polls taken near the election, that’s where they try to establish their credibility. Right now, the idea that they wouldn’t use their polling data to try to advance an agenda is absurd.

Why would the media polling be any different than media reporting? What, the polling companies are sacrosanct, independent, not affected by politics? No. Folks, on the other hand, here, I’m not… (sigh) This isn’t sour grapes, and I’m not complaining about it. I’m actually trying to deeply analyze this to try and to explain it, ’cause it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t know how you arrive at the idea that ten to 11% more Democrats are gonna turn out to vote than Republicans.

That doesn’t make sense to me.

I don’t know how you get a result that shows a majority of Americans think Obama is better suited to run the economy than anybody else. The economy has gone straight south for 3-1/2 years under his watch. We have to believe that people don’t blame him, that he’s just a victim himself of previous administrations, and “Boy, he’s really worked hard, and he’s really tried. The poor guy, we really love him. We hope he does well.” That’s the majority sentiment in the country?

That’s what they want us to believe.

Also, there’s this notion out there that losers and people who think they’re losing, or know they’re losing, immediately start constructing excuses way in advance like blaming it on the polls. That’s not what we’re doing here, ’cause I don’t think we’re gonna lose. I think we’re watching something profound. I’ve never seen media bias the way it is! I’ve never seen a media in the tank the way it is. I’ve never seen corruption in the media the way it has been the last 3-1/2 years.

Not just in this campaign, but the last 3-1/2 years. I have never seen this, even going back to the 2008 campaign. I’ve never seen a media go out of its way to not tell the people of this country about one of the two men who wants to be president. I’ve never before in my life seen a media go out of its way to keep people from finding out who one of the men who wants to be president really is. Not to the degree that it happened in 2008. One more, and this is the managing editor of TheHill.com, Bob Cusack.

CUSACK: Rush has a point. I don’t think that Obama is up double digits in these states, because these polls are assuming 2008 turnout for Obama. Do I think Obama’s up in these battlegrounds? Yes. Do I think he’s up eight, 10, 12 points in these battleground states? I don’t think so.

RUSH: Okay. I appreciate that, but I still have a question. I’m just a naturally inquisitive human being. If you don’t believe the polls, and Obama’s not up ten or 12 points but he’s still up, why? Why do you think he’s up? If you don’t believe the sample, you think the sample’s incorrect, if you don’t believe it’s eight, ten, 12, is it two? Is it three? What? I’m not being critical. It’s just an open-ended question.

Yeah, he’s winning. Not by eight, ten or 12, but he’s winning.

Really? How? What’s the data on that?