RUSH: Okay, some of the polling data here.  Let’s see.  Reuters.  Something is going on. Two weeks ago at this time Hillary was up 12, and then she was up nine.  In the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, Hillary leads Trump by five.  Now, remember, this is the poll, the Reuters poll, that does not permit people to say that they are undecided.  It was last Tuesday, it was just a week ago that it was 12 points.  And it was Friday that she was up by eight.  That’s right.  They had two polls last week.  So the headline could easily be: “Trump Trims Hillary’s Lead by Seven Points in Less Than a Week.” 

“In a separate Reuters/Ipsos poll that includes candidates from small, alternative parties, Clinton leads the field by a smaller margin. Some 39 percent of likely voters supported Clinton in the four-way poll, compared with 36 percent for Trump, 7 percent for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and 3 percent for Green Party nominee Jill Stein.”

So the translation, when all the parties are in the mix, as they probably will be in November, Hillary only leads by three, which is within the margin of error, and she’s not even at 40%.  

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Morning Consult, another poll.  “Trump Closes Gap to Near Margin of Error.”  Now, the Morning Consult poll, on a scale of A, B, C, D, E, they have a B rating from the experts at the FiveThirtyEight website.  And in this poll, what do we have here? 

“Donald Trump trails Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by only 3 percentage points in a new national poll from Morning Consult, shrinking a deficit that has alarmed GOP operatives who fear their unconventional nominee may harm the prospects of other Republican candidates on the ballot this fall.  In a survey taken Aug. 24 through Aug. 26, Trump halved the 6-point,” to a 3-point lead. It’s 43 to 40 registered voters. It hasn’t been this close in the Morning Consult poll since July.

So the polling data continues all over the board.  Now, I’m sure there are gonna be some polls later on this week that show these margins a little better for Hillary, NBC/Wall Street Journal, ABC/Washington Post.  I mean, they’re gonna go back and back and forth.  But the point is, there isn’t any unanimity on them.  There isn’t any sameness about them.  So it’s all over the board.  And it leads me to believe that a lot of these outfits are having trouble finding what they really think is a good sample.  Registered voters, likely voters, adults. 

The LA Times/USC poll, the daily poll that they publish at midnight every night, sample of 3,000 people, 400 of whom are identical every poll, the same 400 are polled every day with 2,600 different people added every day, and it’s a wash now, almost a dead heat.  This was the poll that Trump was up seven before the Democrat convention. Then the Democrat convention happened, Hillary got a bounce up to I think six and a half, and now it’s back down to dead heat.  So the politics of this continues to confound people who continue to look at this through the standard political prism, which I continue to maintain is a distortion and not predictable per se as to Trump and his fortunes.  

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RUSH:  We got some more polling data here.  This is from Emerson College.  “Three new Emerson College polls show a tight race shaping up between Clinton and Trump in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania.” They’re deadlocked at 43% in Ohio.  You’ve heard of the Emerson poll, right? (interruption) Yeah.  Clinton leads by three in Pennsylvania, in the forties.  Again, tied in Ohio at 43%.  Clinton leads Pennsylvania (46% to 43%) and by five in Michigan (45% to 40%).  Gary Johnson, Libertarian ahs 7% of the vote in Pennsylvania and Michigan; 10% in Ohio.  The Green Party candidate, Jill Stein…

And these people are gonna be there in November, so it’s best to calculate them.  Jill Stein gets 2% of the vote in Ohio and Pennsylvania; 3% in Michigan.  “Trump in the Emerson poll still has “a significant gender gap,” women favoring Clinton by 26 points in Michigan, 15 points in Pennsylvania, and 13 points in Ohio.  “Younger voters favor Clinton over Trump in Ohio (by 50% to 32%) and Pennsylvania (42% to 39%). But in Michigan … Trump leads 45% to 33% among those 18-34,” young people, Millennials.

A lot of my friends have Millennial kids.  It’s amazing.  You know, I could do a whole show on this.  It’s amazing what the Millennial kids think, and they don’t think at all what their parents thought, which is amazing.  It’s interesting in its own right now.  I mean, their parents were conservative. They were not extremist radicals, just standard Republican voters and conservatives.  And their kids never really rebelled against it.  But they go away to college and they come back and they’re not recognized.

And in some cases the parents, the friends of mine, have also begun to adopt what their kids believe.  That’s really fascinating to me.  But the upshot of it is that in the examples I have personal knowledge of, what I’m being told by my friends — the parents — is that their Millennial kids just don’t like Trump at all.  And they think government’s wonderful and great and the most important thing in people’s lives and so forth.  I take some of this with a grain of salt.

But there’s some evidence in the polling data that Trump does have a bit of a gap with young people, but I think he could erase it. But you know what it is? You know what the reason for the gap is with the young?  They don’t like the yelling.  They don’t like the constant arguing and the bickering. It makes ’em nervous. They don’t want to hear it, don’t want to hear it.  It’s okay if it happens in a reality show, but they’re just made nervous by it. But I think they could be reached.  But, of course, I am the ultimate optimist.  I always have been.