RUSH: Some shocking news in the Drive-By Media today. The election is over. Mitt Romney has lost. It’s all over out there. Actually, that’s not the case. The polls today are starting to tighten up exactly as predicted here. Now we’re into October. The debate is Wednesday night. Have you noticed what’s going on with this? The DNC and Howard Dean and a number of others… Even Obama himself is saying, “Mitt’s a much better debater than I am.”

They’re really out there lowering expectations for Obama in the debate on Wednesday night, and he’s got a tough task. I mean, the guy can do nothing but lie, which is what he does anyway. It’s gonna be fascinating to me to see how Romney deals with that. Yeah, AP says that Obama has 271 electoral votes today. So I don’t know why they’re gonna do the debate. First, second, or third. Why are they gonna mess with it?

The election is over.

David Plouffe tells us the election is over. F. Chuck Todd says the election’s over. David Gregory says the election’s over. I don’t even know why we do the election! But if you dig deep, you find things aren’t necessarily so. For example, Rasmussen yesterday: “43% of voters are certain they will vote for Romney; 42% are certain that they will vote for Obama. The remaining 15% are either uncommitted or remain open to changing their minds.”

So according Rasmussen, 43% are solid Romney, 42% solid Obama, and 15% yet to be persuaded. There’s something else happening out there, and I don’t want to make too big a deal out of this because I don’t really know. But go back to the Univision appearance that Obama did. We put together that montage of questions from the Univision hosts, and they were the first real questions Obama has faced as president. They were tough. They were questions that bore into his failures, his un-kept promises and so forth.

One of the big ones was amnesty, illegal immigration. These people bore in. “But you promised!” And Obama did his usual song and dance and tried to blame it on other people and said, “You can’t change Washington from the inside” and he knows that now. I got the impression when we put that montage together, and while watching that show and watching Obama on it, that I don’t think he realized… I think Obama’s ego, narcissism is such that he really believes that there is no problem after he shows up someplace.

There might be a problem when he shows up, but he magically — just because of his presence — takes care of any problem anybody might have with him just by showing up. And I don’t think he got it. Now, I don’t know about his staff, but I don’t think he realized that those people were not happy with him. And then yesterday Univision did a thorough expose of Fast and Furious. They went further than any American network has gone, and they laid the blame on Holder.

Remember during that Obama appearance with Univision, one of the hosts asked him if Eric Holder should be fired, or made the statement that Eric Holder should be fired? And Obama lied about it. He said, “Oh, that started under the Bush administration.” It didn’t start in the Bush administration. Fast and Furious is an Obama-Holder operation. They conceived it and they put it into place. This Univision show last night was equally hard hitting on Obama and Holder over Fast and Furious.

And they made the point that it was Mexicans who died with American guns made possible by Barack Obama. Now, folks, we are never going to be told anything but that Obama owns the Hispanic vote. Just like he owns the black vote. And just like they tell us he owns the female vote. He owns the Hispanic vote. And I’m not trying to be dramatic about anything here, and I’m not engaging in wishful thinking. I’m just telling you what’s in my gut.

Something is going on with this Univision coverage, and that is a huge audience. Univision, Telemundo, it’s a huge Hispanic audience, and this report they did on Fast and Furious was anything but flattering for Obama. It was last night. Snerdley and the guys on the other side of the glass are looking at me with looks of utter ignorance on their faces. They think I don’t know what I’m talking about. (interruption) This the first you’ve heard about this? That’s my point.

But the Hispanic people who watched it, watched it. They watched it in droves, and they saw a treatment of Fast and Furious that they’ve not seen anywhere other than on Univision in the Obama interview, or Telemundo, wherever it was. I’m just telling you. It may be nothing. My instinct tells me that something’s happening here. I’m not trying to be melodramatic about it. I’m just saying that the Hispanic vote may not end up being as automatic for Obama as the conventional wisdom has it.

Then you see the Rasmussen number. This is another little hidden thing. You know, the Drive-Bys discount Rasmussen because he’s on Fox a lot, and they think Rasmussen is a conservative poll and therefore he’s not qualified. He’s not legitimate. They look at him the way we look at their polling. Except Rasmussen happens to be always in the top five and often at the very top in accuracy predicting presidential results.

This thing dribbled out yesterday morning: 43% certain to vote for Romney, 42% certain to vote for Obama, 15% uncommitted. The Drive-Bys have told us that it is so bad for Romney in Ohio that the only chance he’s got there is to change committed Obama voters’ minds. ABC has a story out today that’s quite conflicting, and they’ve had to change their headline about this story.

It says two to one people think Obama’s gonna win, but in their poll it’s very close. Two to one Obama is gonna win the election! Two to one Obama’s gonna win the debate! But in the poll, it is tightening. Then there’s USA Today, and this is the enthusiasm gap. This is along the lines of how the media are oversampling Democrats. And have you noticed, by the way, the now predictable line: “Well, that means that they’ve lost, if Limbaugh and these people are now complaining about the polling.

“You only do that when you lose. When you know you’re losing, that’s when you complain about media bias. When you complain about polls and the sample, that’s how they tell us that they know they’re losing.” That’s what’s being said about us. They can’t get it through their heads that I don’t think we’re losing, and I don’t think we’re going to lose. This is simply where we are documenting what is unprecedented in this country.

Hell, Pat Caddell went to an Accuracy in Media conference over the weekend and basically said that the… And this is the Carter, Jimmy Carter’s pollster. He basically said that the American media has become an enemy of the people of this country; that it is derelict in its duty, in its constitutional duty. I have the sound bites. It’s coming up. But speaking of the polls and how the media are oversampling Democrats, a USA Today/Gallup poll was released over the weekend, and it had this headline:

“Rich and Poor, Male and Female: What Groups Would Thrive Under Obama or Romney.” But buried 13 paragraphs into the 16-paragraph USA Today story was this detail. Quote: “Republicans have opened a big enthusiasm gap. Sixty-four percent say that they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting compared to 48% of Democrats.” Now, folks, I did the numbers. I ran the numbers on that. I got out a calculator, and I subtracted 48 from 64.

You know what I got? I got an enthusiasm gap of 16% pro-Republican, and that’s in paragraph 13 of the 16-paragraph story in USA Today. “Sixty-four percent of Republicans say they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting,” which makes perfect sense, “compared to 48% of Democrats.” That’s a huge story. But USA Today and Gallup don’t think it’s that newsworthy and they don’t seem to think they should sample Republicans accordingly.

If there’s a 16% enthusiasm gap that your own poll turns up, what are you doing sampling Democrats plus-nine or plus-ten? Anywhere! Ohio, Florida, what have you. Now, let’s go back to 2008. Back in 2008, Gallup had no problem whatsoever reporting to the world the huge enthusiasm gap that the Democrats enjoyed back then. From Gallup, October 13, 2008, four years ago:

“Democrats’ Election Enthusiasm Far Outweighs Republicans — Only 51% of Republicans say that they are more enthusiastic about voting than in previous years compared to 71% of Democrats, marking a shift from October 2004.” So there was a 20% enthusiasm gap in ’08 in the Gallup poll for Democrats. That’s now become a 16% gap for the Republicans, and it’s in paragraph 13 of USA Today’s story. Back in 2008 it was the lead. This is a massive gap. I mean, add the numbers.

It’s a 36% shift here in enthusiasm. You notice that the Republicans won in 2004 “when enthusiasm was about the same for both partisan groups.” So what would you expect the outcome to be when the enthusiasm for Republicans is up by 16? No, no, that’s not in USA Today. I’m just extrapolating now. I know what happened back in 2004. So Obama wins with a 20% enthusiasm edge, and yet we’re supposed to believe that Romney is sure to lose with a 16% enthusiasm edge?

And when the Republicans won in 2004 when it was equal? Nope. Nope. Once again, no false optimism here, no artificially being positive or any of that. I’m just telling you what is.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, we mentioned also that there’s a Washington Post/ABC poll that’s out today. That’s the poll that claims that, by a two-to-one margin, people think Obama’s gonna be reelected. It also says that Obama is gonna mop the floor with Romney in the debates. But here’s their latest question: “Who would you rather see as a contestant on Dancing with the Stars, (Obama) or (Romney)?” That’s the kind of stuff that they put in their poll — Who would you rather see on Dancing With the Stars? — and they’ll extrapolate that.

Now, we’ve told you before about this outfit Public Policy Polling from North Carolina. They’re a big, big liberal bunch. They say that Ohio isn’t over, that it’s still neck and neck in Ohio. “PPP’s newest poll of the Presidential race in Ohio finds Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney 49-45, down just slightly from a 50-45 advantage on our last independent poll there three weeks ago.” Now, it’s October.

This is the point in time where the polls do start to tighten up because now is when the pollsters start really being concerned about how they finish in terms of predictions and accuracy and all that. But Public Policy Polling says right here in their own release: “It’s a mistake to think based on recent polling in Ohio that the race there is over. Obama is not popular in the state, with 48% of voters approving of him to 49% who disapprove.

“Among voters who remain undecided there just 13% think he’s doing a good job to 65% who give him poor marks.” Now, can I run that by you again, and emphasize to you that Public Policy Polling has Obama up over Romney 49-45? Keep that number in mind. It’s just outside the margin of error: 49-45, Obama over Romney. However, he’s “not popular in the state.” Forty-eight percent of voters approve of Obama; 49% disapprove.

Yet, PPP says he beats Romney by four. “Among voters who remain undecided,” and there are a lot of them, “just 13% think that Obama is doing a good job to 65% who give him poor marks.” I’ll tell you something else, a dirty little secret about polling. Undecided voters, the majority of them always go for the challenger. That’s why they’re undecided. If they’re undecided, there’s something wrong with the incumbent. That’s just human nature and common sense.

The pollsters don’t want you to know that, but the majority of undecideds always end up going with the challenger. The Democrat oversample in the PPP poll is 5%. He’s ahead by four in a Democrat poll in Ohio. This is the same state where last week ABC or NBC, I forget which, had him up ten or 11 in Ohio. And they said it was over. That was CBS/New York Times. I take it back. That was Quinnipiac or Marist. It was with CBS ’cause it was Jan Crawford of CBS who said (summarized), “Well, this is over. There’s nothing Romney can do.”

Last week they had Romney finished, cooked, so don’t even bother voting in Ohio. So this is the week. This is the week, folks, that our bipolar pollsters are saying the race is getting tighter. Public Policy Polling — they don’t like it when I say this, but — is practically a Democrat front organization, and they’re saying that this is trending toward Romney in Ohio. So we’ll see. There’s still a lot of time left to go and a lot of things left to happen, and the polls are gonna be a roller coaster (as is the news each and every day).