RUSH: Here’s Patty in Naugatuck, Connecticut. Great to have you. Glad you waited. Welcome to the program.

CALLER: Thank you for taking my call. I have a two-part question.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Has the reduction in telephone land lines affected the validity of the polls, and if so, how?

RUSH: Yes, it has. Most definitely it has. The reason is that there is no national directory for cell numbers, so you can’t get a good target demographic sample. The people who are remaining with land line usage, of course, tend to be in the older demographics, and that’s fine, but it doesn’t give you nearly the cross-section of the population demographic that you need.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: But the polls are a frustrating thing to me, too. For example, Patty, we were talking last week or earlier this week, where are the polls on the vulnerable Democrats in the Senate this November? Where are those polls? Remember, Larry Sabato, the brilliant political scientist from the University of Virginia earlier this week said, “What wave? Everybody’s talking about a Republican wave election. I don’t see any wave.” Because there aren’t any polls. Polls have become such elements of manipulation for the media. Polls are not used to reflect public opinion anymore. They are used to shape it. And that is a huge difference, huge.

Poll results are now lead news stories, for crying out loud. Or a lead news story today is not about telling people what’s happening or what did happen. It’s about shaping public opinion, be it a poll, be it any news story. The lead story out of Ferguson, Missouri, was not to tell people what went on. It was to create a template or a narrative of what they wanted people to believe about what went on.

So the fact that there aren’t any polls on these Democrats who are vulnerable in November, Democrat Senators, tells me that the people in charge of the polls don’t want to put the data out ’cause it’s too devastating. ‘Cause if the polls showed that the Republicans are not gonna win as big as everybody thinks, those polls would be the lead item every day, and there aren’t any. The polls are being taken, don’t misunderstand. They’re just not being reported.

Now, the candidates are doing their polls. But they never release their internal data. They always keep that close to the vest. So the whole subject of polls is a irritation to me, too. I mean sometimes they’re right on the money, have to acknowledge it, but they still are used for ways that are diametrically opposite what most people, particularly low-information people, think they’re for.