Rush Limbaugh is a savvy guy who thinks Republican leaders are wrong to shun the idea of another government shutdown. Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” he argued that the only important poll is the one held on Election Day. “[The GOP] won a landslide election 10 months after that so-called shutdown. … The essence of a poll is an election, and I’ve got two of them. And we would have won in 2012 if four million Republicans hadn’t stayed home.”

The belief that Romney would have won in 2012 if millions of Republicans hadn’t sat out the election is widely shared on the Right, but it’s probably not true. Sean Trende, one of the country’s most careful election analysts, examined turnout data for RealClearPolitics. Counties that voted for Ross Perot tended to show a drop-off in 2012, suggesting that a possible 6.5 million white voters were “missing” in 2012. But, as Trende observes, Romney would have had to win those voters by 90 percent to alter the outcome of the election, and considering that he won an average of 60 percent of white votes, that seems farfetched.