RUSH: The Virginia governor’s race. This is a toughie to predict because in normal circumstances, the Democrat, Ralph Northam, would run away with this simply because of the voter makeup in Virginia, because northern Virginia is basically an extension of the swamp. It’s an extension of the Washington establishment. But despite that, it’s a red state, or it’s a purple state. So Gillespie has a chance here. Now, spies on the ground tell me that there’s some rain, and I’ve always been amazed how rain curtails activity, but it does.

And the spies on the ground at some of the precincts that we are watching here at the EIB Network are reporting rather low turnout, particularly in the northern Virginia suburbs where the majority of voting happens early — and if it’s heavy, it’s big. Very little late-afternoon voting in some of these northern Virginia precincts. So experienced analysts in Virginia are putting all this together and issuing a wild guess (which is all any of this is at this stage) and that is that if turnout is low and the rain continues to suppress turnout, that that has to be helpful to Gillespie.

Gillespie, for his part, when you track Gillespie, the candidate before he found the route to embracing Trumpism — in other words, when Gillespie was running as your standard, ordinary issue Republican establishment — he was uninspired. He was uninterested. It was like he knew he was gonna lose but he was in it in case a bolt out of the blue changed things. But Gillespie has become energized in this campaign, not just because of the ad that the Latino Victory Fund ran. He’s become energized because the majority of the people that are gonna vote for him or that are inclined to are also Trumpists, and he’s become an entirely different candidate.

And now it’s generally conceded that he has a legitimate chance of winning this thing when, under all normal circumstances, it wouldn’t be this close. There’s another added factor. The outgoing governor, The Punk, Terry McAuliffe… Hillary won this state in 2016 because The Punk… You know, the Clinton machine. They have the voting machines and the precinct. They have the stuff sort of wired — and McAuliffe, I’m sure, still does here. So there’s a lot for Gillespie to overcome.

But it’s beginning to look like it might be possible.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Finally, we’re getting some honesty out of people. Folks, I’ve been getting emails all day, people asking me, “Come on, Rush. What’s the inside of what’s going on in the Virginia governor’s race?” So I have been checking in with people who are in that business, and everybody’s telling me they have no idea. Nobody knows. Nobody knows what turnout means, what weather means. Nobody is even hazarding a guess. I take it back. That’s what people are doing.

Nobody has the gut feeling one way or the other about this, that I’m running into such as during the presidential race a year ago. I had a gut feeling Trump was gonna win shortly after he announced for a host of reasons — many of them personal, by the way. Not personal me and Trump. But personal because I recognized — (chuckles) did I ever recognize — the kind of support Trump was getting. I had seen it all before and I knew a lot about it. So nobody has a feel for it, which to me gives an edge to Gillespie. This is a state that ought not be a toss-up, just on the registered numbers alone. So we’ll keep a sharp eye.