RUSH: Grab audio sound bite number 19. I’ve had some emails today from people who want me to explain further why I am always so confident in telling you in the audience who the establishment is and what they’re doing and what they’re gonna do and how they think and all that.
And, look, folks, I’ve been doing this for 29 years. Actually, if you count the four years in Sacramento, 33 years, and my life prior to that was spent being highly interested in all this stuff. It’s been learning process all of these years. I mean, the learning never stops, as I say. And it’s just recognizing what is. And part of it is these are things I couldn’t know when I was 35 or 40. I hadn’t lived long enough. I hadn’t met enough people. I hadn’t had enough opportunities to see and hang around people up close to learn how and who they are and what they do.
It really does require a certain number of years of experience, up close and from afar, and keen powers of observation that you add to the base of knowledge that’s constantly expanding. You go back and listen to this program back in the nineties, there wasn’t any talk of a ruling class, the elites, the establishment. It was there. The closest we got to it was when we discussed the Republican Party and conservatism and how they really don’t like conservatives ’cause they associate it with the Barry Goldwater landslide loss and how they weren’t big on Reagan. But it’s taken years for me to figure this out, to learn it and to be sure of it myself.
But I have a sound bite here that might help. This is Mike Murphy. Mike Murphy, probably by reputation, is the Republican Party’s leading political consultant. Murphy has probably been hired by more candidates for high office, and there may be others; I don’t know. I’m not trying to short anybody here, but as far as I know, Murphy ranks. If he’s not number one, he’s in a very short list, top five for sure. And, as such, he’s a go-to guy.
Murphy ran Jeb Bush’s $150 million. So when Jeb Bush says that he’s gonna win the nomination by losing the base, that was a philosophy developed by Republican consultants. The Republican consultants class, the people that candidates hire to organize their campaigns, put together their ad campaigns, place the advertising buys, all of that the consultants do.
They’re campaign managers in many respects. And many in the Republican Party, as you well know, have a very arm’s-length relationship with the Republican base. It’s rooted in abortion and the so-called social issues, which the mainstream of the Republican Party and the entire establishment is deathly opposed to. Abortion, smortion. They don’t want it to be part of any campaign, they don’t think they win with it.
And, by the same token, these are people that believe the Republican Party can’t win anything if it doesn’t support amnesty. Well, what they believe is the Republican Party can’t win anything if it doesn’t appeal to the Hispanic vote. To them politics has become demographics, not ideas. This is my big problem with them. I’ve always thought politics is ideas. And maybe not politics, but advancing, appealing to an ever-expanding majority of people is rooted in ideas, to me, not demographics.
When you go the demographic route, you are, by definition, giving up on persuading anybody. If you think you need Hispanics, for example, you’ll go out and try to be what you think they want you to be. Even if that means you have to support something you really don’t believe in, like amnesty, you go out and say you do. And you’ve got donors demanding you do that, then that’s even more reason to go do it.
This is my big problem with all of this. Demographics are one thing and I don’t mind factoring them, and I’ve always thought — and it’s not my business, so I could be dead wrong. I’m not in the political consultants business, and I’m not in the business of running elections. There are professionals that do that. But like everybody else I have my thoughts and opinions on it.
But I’ve always believed that people are human beings, and we have some things in common, and finding them and appealing to them as human beings rather than as victims or members of a group is, in the long run, gonna be far more meaningful and productive than taking your policy manual and slicing it up into a bunch of different things that may not have anything in common, but you are out appealing to this group that you’re weak in. Maybe you’re having trouble with women so you come up with things to say to women to get them to support you. I just think it’s a losing proposition, and it has been, until Trump has come along, and Trump didn’t do any of that.
Trump spoke to people as people. And he spoke to people where they live and how they live and the reasons why, and it didn’t matter what their race was. It didn’t matter what their sex or sexual orientation was, and, as such, the whole demographic thing didn’t matter. It’s Democrats, too. To the consultant class, the establishment class, it’s all about groups and the way you tailor messages for groups of people rather than having an overarching message for everybody.
So Murphy is one of these Republicans that believes, for example, that we didn’t have a prayer of ever winning the White House again if we didn’t find a way to reach Hispanics. Now, just saying that may be true. I don’t know. But it’s what comes next, is the problem. The assumption is that every Hispanic thinks alike. That is the first assumption. The second assumption is that something they all agree on is that we have to have open borders.
In other words, they believe that you have Hispanics who live in the country, and they’re citizens. But if you don’t open the country up to everybody with an Hispanic name, they’re not gonna vote for you. So their view of Hispanics is that they care about Hispanics first, second, and third — and Latinos — and getting into the country whether they’re breaking the law or not. Now, I just don’t think that’s the case.
I don’t think you can take an entire group of people like Hispanics and claim that most of them are willing to be lawless while being true to their heritage. But this is what we end up essentially hearing or believing. So, given that, here’s Mike Murphy. He was on the Bloomberg TV show, With All Due Respect. This is John Heilemann and Mike Murphy. Heilemann with Mark Halperin does this show. Here’s the question. Heilemann says, “Mike, why were you so confident for so long there was no way Trump would win? What did you get wrong?”
MURPHY: I did not think he’d do better with Latinos. I assumed she’d get historic numbers of African-American turnout in places like Detroit and Milwaukee, which she did not do, Hillary Clinton. And, finally, I knew we’d do well with non-college educated, white working class folks, but I did not know he would break the meter. I was looking at Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, Wilkes-Barre, which is a good working class, kind of tilt-Democrat area. He blew away Reagan numbers there. That kind of thing in places like there — and the Michael Moore towns in Michigan, around Flint and other places, Wisconsin — was enough to give him a lead of about a hundred thousand votes in those threes states and pick the lock of the Electoral College. I missed that coming because that has not been seen before.
RUSH: Right. “I missed that … because that has not been seen before.” I’m not playing this to be critical of Murphy. It’s just an opportunity for me to explain to you why I say or think the things I do about this. I think people get locked into, “Can’t do that, can’t do this. Gotta do this, gotta do that,” and even on Fox. Up until nine o’clock election night on Fox, there were various people saying, “This is gonna be a bloodbath.
“You see all the late votes of Hispanics and all the Hispanic early votes. Oh, my God, do you realize what a bloodbath this is gonna be for Trump?” Just the assumption that simply because they were Hispanic, they were gonna vote against Republican because Republicans were seen as against. And it just… I love it being blown to smithereens.