I never listen to radio unless I'm in a car, something much less frequent at this point in my life than in past times. When I am listening, it's always talk radio, and nearly always right wing. In fact, I've been listening to right wing talk for thirty years, and to Limbaugh, specifically for twenty. Call me a glutton for pinishment, but I've also become quite adept (I believe) at hearing much more from many of these shows than the folks in the target audience are ever aware of. For instance, there is "playbook" type coordination, and the "signaling" commonly provides strong clues to Republican political moves, often even substantially in advance of full public rollout.
So what I heard on Limbaugh yesterday left me feeling shocked, and I can only hope that I'm overreacting.
An actual quote would be something like "I obviously believe in polls, but when they say something that I don't agree with they're inaccurate. And right now the massive innaccuracy is in saying that Mitt Romney will lose this year. Trust me, Romney will be elected."
What I waited for that never came veritably shouted cause for alarm. There should have been a contentious harangue of the conspiracy of the left for trying to dampen conservative turnout, and a spirited "cheer leading" for all of the dittoheads to shrug off such a trasparent ploy and rally massively at the ballot box. It never came!
Realistically none of the primary candidates this year has ever had a legitimate shot at winning a legitimate election. Of the lot, Romney had to be the consenus standard bearer by the stratospheric level right wing movers and shakers. And even he was clearly never more than "the least bad of the group". Accordingly, even he cannot and will not win a fraud free election.
But that is not the same as saying that he will not end up as the apparent winner on that fateful Wednesday morning. And if and when that should happen, the folks pulling the strings know that, in order to make the scam stand, they at least have to have the small half of the voting citizenry primed to join full throat in the "debate" over whether the lead up polling was, or was not, trustworthy.
It looks to me like the campaign to assure that knee jerk coordination may very well already be well under way!