RUSH: I wish I could use that too. But I don’t dare. I don’t dare use either one of them. I just cracked a couple of jokes here to the staff, and their reaction is to shake their heads. They’re laughing uncontrollably and then shaking their heads at the same time and saying, “You better not. You can’t say that.” And, of course, they’re right.

Anyway, how are you, my friends? It is great to have you with us. It’s great to be with you. We have three hours of broadcast excellence straight ahead. The phone number if you want to join us today is 800-282-2882, and the email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us.

So President Trump, another rally, Moon Township by Pittsburgh last night. You know, folks, I have to tell you something. I watch these rallies. But more than that, I look at these crowds. Do you realize how big these crowds are? These crowds, especially in the past couple of weeks of rallies, these crowds have been bigger than any of the crowds in 2016. And the campaign releases photos of the crowd after the event or during the event. It’s massive.

And I have found myself asking a question. Who are these people? And I’m not asking that in terms of being critical at all. I really would like to know who they are. Let me put it this way. Who is it that would, I know the weather’s not cold yet, but it’s in the sixties and fifties now in late September. These people are showing up from who knows where. I’m sure nearby, but they’re showing up and you don’t just drive to the event here and spend a couple hours and leave.

You’ve gotta get there early if you want to get in. You’ve gotta go through security. It’s pretty much a multiple-hour commitment to go to one of these things. And you’re not gonna get close enough to the president to get a selfie photo or a handshake, certainly not, or an autograph. The president pretty much scoots when these things are over, after he dances to YMCA. They play YMCA as the closing music when the president finishes. And he does his little dance and jive to it and then gets on the plane and splits.

But there are literally thousands and thousands of people. They’re being totally ignored by the media. It’s as though they’re not there. They are taken for granted. It’s not assumed, and it’s not even questioned what impact all these people are going to have on the election. It strikes me how odd it is that there isn’t any curiosity about it. And I know why.

I just watched television here before the big broadcast began. And there’s some Democrat senator on named Chris Murphy. This was on Fox. And Chris Murphy is going on and on and on about how the Republican Party is just a cult. A cult? Have you all seen the way the casket of Ruth Ginsburg arrived at the Supreme Court today? If you want to see a cult, take a look at the way the left is handling the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Anyway. So this guy, this Senator Chris Murphy, says, “These guys, they’re just a cult.” And he says (paraphrasing), “I’ll give you the proof. The proof is that they are already unanimously supporting a nominee that they don’t even know. They don’t know who the nominee is. The president isn’t gonna announce the nominee until Saturday at 5 o’clock, and yet this cult party, the Republicans, are in total unity already.”

And I said, you know, that’s very clever, Senator Murphy, but that’s not the way to look at this. How about you people on the Democrat side? You are already destroying a nominee that you haven’t seen yet. You have already begun the process that you engage in every time one of these things happens. You have already begun your attempt to destroy the nominee, and you don’t know who the nominee is, and yet the Republicans are somehow a cult because they are supporting a nominee that they don’t even know yet.

The fact is they do know. Trump provided a list. And the fact of the matter is that anybody on that list is pretty much gonna be accepted, and particularly with the top two that are speculated here, Judge Lagoa and Judge Barrett. I mean, either one of those two would be a grand-slam home run. They’ve been vetted before, Senator.

They are on the judiciary as is, already out there on the circuit court. So they’ve been through this. You people in the Senate, the Democrats, know who they are. You’ve vetted them. Trump gave us a list, so we know who these people are. They’ve got judicial track records. You don’t have to be a cultist. This is not a blind acceptance. It’s not as though we don’t know who the nominee is gonna be. We just don’t know specifically which one it’s…

APPLE WATCH: (interrupting)

RUSH: No, I was not just washing my hands. Why do you think I was just washing my hands? My watch just asked me if I was washing my hands. Do you know the watch now (rubbing hands) when you wash your hands, it records it, it urges you to do it and came out long before even COVID was a big deal. (rubbing hands) I must have been rubbing my hands together like when you wash your hands.

The watch, the microphone hears water running and thinks it knows and so it asks you. That has to be what happened here. So, at any rate, they can’t stop the nominee. They don’t have the votes. Now, a clarification about Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney has not promised to vote for the nominee. Mitt Romney said that he’s not going to vote against a floor vote for whoever the nominee is.

But he is going to wait to make sure the nominee is qualified. Now, Romney is like everybody else. Romney knows who it’s gonna be — one of two, one of three. Romney. If he wanted to, could announce his support, but he’s gonna wait until Trump actually names the judge. Trump’s out there saying, “Oh, man the Republicans have never been more unified than they are now.”

And that’s true in any number of ways you might want to look at it. You look at 92% of the Republican Party — the voters; the base, if you will — supports Trump. Eighty-two percent are in favor of one of these two judges being nominated. The Democrats are just frustrated that as it appears on paper, they can’t stop the nominee.

But you know what, folks? It’s not gonna stop them from trying. They’re gonna do what they do. Once there’s hearings happen — three days, four days, whatever the limit is — they’re gonna do what they do. They’re going to do everything they can to destroy whoever the nominee is. But I think it’s classic. Senator Murphy (impression), “These people are a cult. They’re supporting a nominee they don’t even know yet.”

And you guys are out trying to destroy a nominee you don’t even know yet — and, furthermore, with you guys, it won’t matter who the nominee is. The nominee could be St. Peter and you people would be out there trying to destroy him, if the Republicans were trying to put him on the Supreme Court. Doesn’t matter who the nominee is as far as you Democrats are concerned.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: No, no, no. I did not lose my place. I’m gonna finish my thought on who these people showing up at the Trump rallies are ’cause I think it’s deep. I think the answer to the question is a profundity in and of itself. It’s massive the numbers of people showing up at these rallies. And, you know, they were totally ignored in 2016. They were totally missed.

Back then, if you recall, the conventional wisdom was that the size of the crowd at rallies was irrelevant to elections, to how much strength a candidate had. It was irrelevant to votes. The conventional wisdom was that rallies, you could have beaucoup people. In other words, it didn’t matter that Hillary Clinton was only drawing 200 or 250 and Trump was drawing 15,000. It didn’t matter ’cause crowd size doesn’t tell you anything.

So they ignored the people, they ignored who they might be, and even to this day, as I have said countless times, maybe so many times I’ve bored many of you, but the professional political class on the Democrat side to this day has not endeavored to find out who those people are. They have not tried to find out who the Trump base is because their arrogance and condescension has already told them who the Trump base is.

And who are they? They’re a bunch of dumb, stupid hayseeds. And that’s all you need to know. They’re a bunch of hicks who make up a cult. They’re unreachable. They’re not worth spending anytime on at all. That’s how the Democrats have seen them since 2015 and it’s how they see them now. Total discount, total ignoring, and it’s so much more than that, particularly the makeup of the crowds in 2016.

Therein lies the secret of the Trump victory. Who were those people in 2016? And when you find out — ’cause I’m gonna tell you after the bottom-of-the-hour break — when you find out, you’ll understand why it’s relevant.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You know, I was just reminded. It’s even worse. Here you have this Senator Chris Murphy talking about how the Republicans are a cult because they’re unified. Actually, they’re not. Now, Trump said they’re more unified than they’ve ever been, and that’s true, but we still have two defectors, and that would be Susan Collins and Murkowski.

But the Democrats, before even knowing who the nominee is, the Democrats are totally unified in opposing whoever the nominee is. So as is the usual case, the Democrats are the gigantic hypocrites. But, of course, it’s not news that there’s hypocrisy and hypocrites in politics.

Before I get to my in-depth breakdown of my question, “Who are these people at the Trump rally?” And, again, it’s not a critical observation, don’t misunderstand. Let me start with line 1. I want to get calls on this now rather than an hour from now when people may not know why the caller is talking about the subject. Get the subject and the calls buttressed back-to-back so it makes sense.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

Stephanie here in Swansboro, North Carolina, welcome to the EIB Network. Great to have you with us. Hi.

CALLER: Oh, my gosh. Rush, this is the greatest thing that’s happened to me in 2020. So I wanted to call because I’ve been to two Trump rallies, I’ve attended one Trump boat parade, and I was in a Trump boat parade that had 3,500 boats in it — and we know that we’re being dismissed by the media.

RUSH: Yep.

CALLER: You know, we talk —

RUSH: Yep.

CALLER: — amongst ourselves when you’re waiting four, six, eight hours, and we’re all employed. We all took a vacation day. We’ve taken our kids, and we love that we’re being dismissed because the longer the time goes by that they don’t have a clue as to who the real patriots of our country are, the hardworking people are?

The more they ignore us, the longer and the more elections we’re gonna win. The one thing that we all discovered is typically the older people, they get the landline phone calls as to who they’re gonna vote for. These little 80- and 70-year-old people — and myself included — we’ve all lied to the pollsters. We’ve all said, “Biden, Biden, Biden, Biden.”

RUSH: Oh, yeah, I know. I know the games you’re playing, and I heartily applaud lying to the pollsters. I don’t want to say that too loud. I don’t want you to quote me on that. But, look, I know who you are. This is the thing. I’ve got a very in-depth explanation of who these people are, you and others at these rallies, and I’ll get to it in the monologue segment in the next hour. I’m glad you called, Stephanie.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: These rallies, the Trump rallies, as I mentioned, really got me curious. All these people that show up, I mean, tens of thousands every rally they are there. They’ve been at every rally for four years, five years now. And especially if you go back four years ago, who were they? Remember the Tea Party. The Tea Party was people — now, this is 2010. And it was Obamacare that gave birth to the Tea Party. It was organic.

The Tea Party was people who had never participated in organized activism before. They had voted, but that was it. They’d not gone to fundraising events or they’d not knocked on doors. They’d not been official employees of any political operation. But when they saw what was going to happen to health care and their kids and grandkids and they were scared to death over the spending, they organically grew out of society.

And it stunned everybody, and it scared the hell out of the Democrats. They didn’t know where these people came from. They immediately had to be destroyed. And so the Democrats created their own group. But the difference is, they went out and actually created a fake and phony group that they tried to pass off as organic. The Tea Party scared the hell out of the Democrats.

Now, when the Trump rallies began six years later, the same thing did not happen. Whoever those people were showing up at the rallies did not scare the Democrats, did not scare the Republicans, did not scare anybody in the political class because they were immediately discounted. They were thought of as brainless, hayseeds. They were for Trump. I mean, what more evidence do you need that they’re dumb, that they’re stupid?

And remember, for most of 2015 and ’16 nobody thought Trump was gonna win, so it didn’t matter who they were. But even after Trump wins, there wasn’t any curiosity about ’em. All there was was an attempt to impugn them, to destroy them, their character, and their reputations. So the Trump team in 2016, they wanted to find out who these people were. And they did.

They found out that there were a lot of people in those rallies who weren’t registered to vote. They would vote for Trump, but they weren’t registered. These people really were deeply buried in our culture and society. They were so turned off of politics for so long that they hadn’t registered to vote, and they hadn’t voted. And they hadn’t been involved in politics, and they hadn’t even paid attention to it.

And it was Donald Trump who awakened them all. It was Donald Trump who brought them out of wherever they were lurking in the shadows. They were uninterested in politics. They didn’t care. They didn’t think it mattered. They didn’t think their vote mattered. They didn’t think there was anything they could do that would change the course of the country, so all they could do was try to find their place in it and make the best life they could.

They had no faith in politics, they had no faith in Washington until Trump came along. These new people, these were not kids coming to voting age, like the Democrats are depending on. The Democrats, every election are waiting for this magical turnout among America’s youth that never happens. That’s not who these people were. They were adults. They lived in flyover country. They were just trying to make a living, have a life. They never felt included in the political process.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to finish this business about these people at the Trump rally, because this is real key now, folks. They’re being totally ignored. They’re not being even now shown proper respect. But these people — and it’s true today, too, the same people — these were adults — it’s important now, in 2016, to remember who they were. They were adults. They lived in flyover country. They were just trying to make a living. They were just trying to have a life. They never felt included in the political process.

It’s not they felt excluded, it’s that they felt it didn’t matter. They were one vote, their one vote didn’t matter. Whatever they wanted never seemed to happen. Politicians were hypocrites and liars. It seemed to them like a waste of time. They used to vote, they used to be involved, but there was never any really payback in that event. So they just tuned out.

Then Donald Trump comes along, and something about the way he spoke and the things he talked about brought them out of the shadows. They did not fall into traditional political groups that are constantly polled and talked to — blacks, Hispanics, lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, Millennial, religious — you couldn’t categorize them that way. And so they were really not very interesting to traditional political consultants and professionals because they couldn’t be categorized.

In fact, nobody really cared. I mean, why would you care about people that don’t vote? Why would you care about people not even registered to vote? So they were just ignored. Now, probably a lot of people are surprised to have this many people not be registered to vote. But there’s more people like that than you could probably comprehend. There are more people that feel left out — and I don’t mean that they feel rejected. It’s not a psychological thing. It’s an intellectual thing. They just think that there’s no — they thought in 2016. Lied to. Nothing ever really changes. They’re watching jobs, their jobs leave, despite the fact they don’t want that to happen. Hang on.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Rush Limbaugh, analyzing the people at the Trump rallies and why they are so influential. The answer to that is largely because the American political class has taken them for granted or ignored them. The Democrats especially, but the Republicans too. But I think there are a lot of people that fall into the category.

They’re not registered. A lot of people can’t understand that. But like yesterday — I don’t know if you noticed it — no matter what you did on your computer or your phone, you were met with a “Get out there and register today!” It was National Voter Registration Day yesterday. You would not believe the number of people that are not registered to vote.

In addition, you wouldn’t believe the number of people the Democrats want to register multiple times. So there’s a lot going on. Remember those old MTV get-out-the-vote campaigns? And they never worked. Their objective was to turn out the vote among the yutes of America, the teenagers, the 18-year-olds all the way up to 34. It was there the Democrats’ power was.

That’s where all the young, blue-eyed liberals were. This is where the future of the Democrat Party was. Those people never showed up to vote, though. They might have registered, but they never showed up to vote. They never do! But there was Rock the Vote; there was Get Out the Vote; there was, you know, Flush the Vote. Every four years, there was a new campaign because there are millions of people who aren’t registered.

Believe me, there are more people who fall into that category than you’d believe. As such, they’re never talked to. If you’re in politics where the name of the game is getting votes, why would you waste time on people that aren’t registered to vote? Especially after all the efforts to register voters, why would you spend time? You wouldn’t. So these people are not talked to.

So nobody cared what their issues were. Nobody cared about their lives. Politically, they didn’t exist. They couldn’t vote, didn’t vote, weren’t gonna vote; so what’s it matter? But, see, it did matter to Trump. These people watched their jobs leave, and they hear people promise in politics it’s not gonna happen. They hear all these promises about tax cuts and how you’re gonna have newfound wealth.

None of it ever happened.

Trump spoke to those people in ways no one had even imagined to try before, and the two things that hit home in Trump’s rallies in 2016 were trade and his simple way of saying, “You have all been screwed over by Washington elites and China, and I am gonna make it right. We’ve had some of the stupidest leaders in our history make the dumbest deals with China,” and that resonated, and the political class couldn’t believe it.

They couldn’t believe that people who were not registered and didn’t care about politics could care a whit about China or trade deals. I mean, trade deals? Those are really elite things. And then, of course, immigration. And immigration they didn’t want to care. They didn’t want to care. The elites didn’t care ’cause they weren’t gonna change their minds about it anyway.

Trump says he’s gonna build a wall, keep illegals out, and he’s gonna get even with the Chinese — and here they came out of the woodwork. So what did Trump and his campaign do with this rather shocking realization of all of this untapped political gold? Here you’ve got thousands and thousands and thousands — maybe millions — of unregistered voters who all of a sudden are interested in politics again ’cause of one guy: Donald Trump.

So what’d they do? You know what they’ve done? They’ve spent the last three years working on these exact people and getting them registered to vote, and this is something the political class has missed. For the past three years, the Trump campaign has been focused on finding as many of these people that go to the rallies and people like them and getting them registered to vote.

They have spent a ton of money and a lot of effort on this group of people who woke up to politics — after a lifetime of being disinterested or uninterested — because of Donald Trump. So the Trump camp and the Republican National Committee have a massive grassroots campaign that nobody knows about. The grassroots campaign is voter registration.

The people are all… They’re qualified leads. They want to vote. It’s like a qualified lead in sales. You don’t have to close the sale, ’cause the qualified lead already wants to spend the money. You just have to find a way to facilitate that. Same thing here. These people, they don’t need to be sold on Trump; they already are.

They just need to be registered, and that’s what the Trump campaign’s been doing for the past three years, along with the Republican National Committee. And yesterday we had national register to vote day or whatever it was called. Every business, every platform, every celebrity was all over your computer all day yesterday — all over your phone — telling you to register to vote, acting like nobody was.

Now, Biden and Kamala Harris don’t have anything like this going on. They have no ground game, because they don’t have to. They have farmed this all out to corporations, to Hollywood, to Michael Bloomberg. Michael Bloomberg is giving money away in Florida to felons or any number of people — and, by the way, there is a story in the Stack about how what Bloomberg is doing may be criminal.

I forget the crime. It’s not extortion, somethingelse. I’ll find it in the story, but a lot of people are thinking that what Bloomberg is doing here by stopping off in Florida and paying people, essentially, to vote the way he wants to vote may not be totally kosher. Anyway, you got Bloomberg; you got Silicon Valley.

All of these get-out-the-vote people, all of these mainstream media people urging to vote, the voter registration drive. They’re doing it for Plugs. He doesn’t have to do it. He doesn’t have to spend any money on it. The left has had sports heroes. They have had Michelle Obama, all this Rock the Vote, get-out-the-vote stuff.

The Trump people have been working themselves silly for the past three years getting every one of these people that showed up to a Trump rally registered to vote — and even at that, you look at them and these massive crowds and you still say, who are they? Who is it that takes the time — and it’s a massive amount of effort to go to one of these rallies, and then they buy hats and the shirts, flags, and all that!

And the closest they get to Trump, they still need binoculars to see him up close. And yet they do it. I don’t even know if the people I’m talking about were members of this audience. I mean, they could have been that disconnected from politics. If the powers that be in politics, Democrat or Republican — if they had a proper understanding who these people are, they would be hustling like you can’t believe to find out who they are and to get ’em registered.

This is a massive find. People that have been disinterested and all of a sudden one day were? All this new passion and so forth. And Trump has them.