Rush Limbaugh Claims Obama is Using Facts and Polls to Suppress the Republican Vote

On his radio show today, Rush Limbaugh claimed that any poll that shows Obama leading is an attempt to suppress the Republican vote.

Transcript from Rush Limbaugh:

So now it’s not a referendum on Obama. It’s a choice between two guys, which means, of course, whatever Romney says matters. I’m here to tell you, folks, you have got to stay bucked up. The effort to depress you and keep you home, I’ve never seen it like this before in my life. I have never seen this intense an effort by the Democrat machine, including the pollsters, and it’s sucking in a lot of our media. A lot of conservative media’s getting sucked in by this. They’re buying it ’cause they get caught up in the bubble that is the world as created and defined every day by the mainstream media. Their lives hinge on polling. And of course the polling, if you look carefully, you can find flaws.

The polls are just being used as another tool of voter suppression. The polls are an attempt to not reflect public opinion, but to shape it. Yours. They want to depress the heck out of you, and they want to suppress your vote. The polls are of adults, registered voters. Let me tell you the polls that count, and those are the polls a couple of weeks before the election. That’s when the pollsters worry about holding onto their credibility. Those are the polls that everybody remembers. Nobody’s gonna talk about what Public Policy Polling said in a poll in Ohio on September 10th. They’re gonna worry about what Public Policy Polling said a week before the election, and that’s when Public Policy Polling, a liberal group out of North Carolina, is gonna tell you what’s really going on.

So if you like polls, forget about ’em until two weeks before the election, because these now are being used specifically to depress you, to hang you up, to get you not voting, to get you mad at Romney. They want you to think Romney’s horrible; Romney’s worthless; Romney’s not conservative; Romney’s selling you out; Romney’s this or that; the election’s not about Obama at all.

Here’s the way this works. Any poll that shows Obama leading is an obvious attempt to suppress the Republican vote. Any piece of data collected that does not favor Mitt Romney is obviously a media conspiracy designed to help Obama win. Limbaugh is ignoring criticism that Nate Silver has been getting from the media today for daring to share with the world that his modeling indicates that the Obama has a really good chance of winning the election.

Rush Limbaugh was telling his audience that facts, statistics, and reality are a conspiracy against them. They should ignore the empirical data and all of its findings that this election is moving towards President Obama. It is all just a conspiracy by Obama to try to get them to stay home.

The polling itself indicates that President Obama has done such a good job making this election about Mitt Romney that voters now see it as a choice between two candidates. On the other side of the coin, Romney did such a poor job trying to turn this contest into a referendum about Obama that none of his arguments have been able to gain much traction.

According to Rush Limbaugh, polling and facts are the same thing as voter purges and voter ID laws. The media is trying to suppress the Republican vote by telling conservatives just how badly Mitt Romney is failing. This has nothing to do with what a lousy candidate Mitt Romney is.

It is all about Obama trying to steal this election by filling voters’ heads with facts.

Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and  Professional Memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association