RUSH: Okay. Okay, everybody knows — well, you may not know. I guess I shouldn’t assume that. The Republicans picked up a congressional seat in Florida yesterday that was supposedly automatic Democrat, and this was an election of rejection of Obamacare. There wasn’t any “for” on the ballot. All there was was anti-Obamacare. I don’t mean to be causing problems here, but there’s a popular statement out there: “We can’t just win on what we’re against. We’ve got to be for things.” You can, folks.
Obamacare is so bad. Did you hear what Obama said the other day? He said (paraphrasing), “Look, if you can’t afford Obamacare, cancel your cable or your cell phone to pay for it.” That’s not gonna fly with the low-information crowd that thinks he’s Santa Claus.
Hi, folks. How are you. Great to have you? El Rushbo here at the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.
David Jolly is the Republican’s name. He wasn’t supposed to win, but he did, big, and it was the media’s concern everywhere. This race was touted as a harbinger of Obamacare, and now it’s come in, and this is not even a big race. He’s not even a big name guy, and the media knew that this was gonna be a litmus test, if you will, for the public’s voting sentiments on Obamacare.
So the Republican wins the seat that was supposed to go to the Democrat, and Debbie “Blabbermouth” Schultz, who, amazingly for us, is still the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, came out and said that this just proves that Obamacare is popular and the Republicans are weak. That is her spin.
Florida Republican David Jolly won the special election on Tuesday to fill a 13th District House seat left vacant by the death of Representative Bill Young. He was a Republican, by the way, but everybody assumed because of demographics and all the other things and just these wild assumptions everybody makes in the popularity of Obama, that the Democrat was gonna win the seat. With nearly all the votes counted, Jolly had 48.5% and the Democrat, Alex Sink — female, by the way — had 46.7. The Libertarian in the race did not stop Jolly. Normally a third party candidate destroys the Republican by taking votes from him. Didn’t happen. The third party, the Libertarian candidate, did not even hurt Jolly.
The Republican candidate fell a million and a half dollars short of Sink in fundraising. That’s big in a congressional race, and David Jolly was outspent in negative campaign ads from outside sources. Nine million total spent on negative ads against this guy, and he still won. And yet 
Debbie “Blabbermouth” Schultz, despite all of this, proves how weak the GOP is. Here is her statement: “Republican special interest groups poured in millions to hold onto a Republican congressional district that they’ve comfortably held for nearly 60 years. Tonight, Republicans fell short of their normal margin in this district because the agenda they are offering voters has a singular focus – that a majority of voters oppose – repealing the Affordable Care Act.”
So what Wasserman Schultz is saying is that because Republicans didn’t win by a greater margin, they actually lost. That’s what she is saying. That’s the thing, Obama won twice. Obama won this district twice, 2008, 2012. The estimable Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report, saw this as a must-win for the Democrats. And it wasn’t. But, folks, that’s not the only good news out there. And there’s more on this as the program unfolds.
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RUSH: Oh, there was another element, by the way, in the campaign, the Jolly/Alex Sink campaign. It’s that Sink tried to overcome the automatic loser status she had because of Obamacare. She tried to tag Jolly as a “global warming denier” and a guy who wanted to destroy the planet, the typical Democrat rigmarole, and that didn’t work.
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RUSH: I’m gonna tell you something about this election down at Pinellas County, this Republican sweep down there by David Jolly. You know what else is a lesson to be learned? We’re gonna have to keep a sharp eye on this, folks, because the Democrats — all of these Senate Democrats up for reelection — have learned that there is an opportunity in running against Obamacare. Politics is copycat, like much of life.
If something works, a lot of people try their own version of it. So the anti-Obamacare vote triumphs in a district that the Democrats thought they were gonna win because Obama won it twice. He won it handily twice, never mind that a Republican held this specific seat. The conventional wisdom was, “Eh, Eh! Obamacare isn’t anything? Nah, there is a lot of love for Obama.” There’s not because there’s a lot of anger over Obamacare.
Well, these Senate Democrats up for reelection can see this, too, not just Republicans. The problem for the Senate Democrats is they all voted for it. So they would have to really go out and say, “We made a huge mistake.” I mean, if they’re gonna run against Obamacare, they’re gonna have to also disavow their vote. But I’m just telling you, I’m just warning you: They, too, are gonna take a lesson from this.
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RUSH: Now, back to the Florida congressional race, the House race. AP even has it in its headline, “Florida House Race Could be Warning for Democrats.” David Jolly beat Alex Sink, a certified woman, by the way, certified woman, Alex Sink. He was outspent three to one. He was a first-time candidate. Bruising primary, by the way. He got beat up bad in the primary.
There was no way this guy was gonna win. He was damaged, outspent, negative advertising campaign, typical Democrat tactic, make this guy sound inhuman. He had to run against a former gubernatorial candidate who had far greater name recognition, and he had to face a Libertarian candidate who siphoned off 5% of the vote. Normally when you got a third-party candidate in there, that’s a guaranteed win for the Democrats.
On top of that, and the reason that the Democrats thought this was a slam dunk for them, Obama won this district in 2008 and 2012, handily. The AP says that this could be a warning for the Democrats even though the race hinged on Obamacare. I’ll tell you what happened in this race, it’s exactly what happened — and this is really relevant, it’s important.
This race duplicated strategically the way the Republicans ran House races in 1994. They nationalized them. This was not about any local issue in the district. This was not about who is gonna be better at getting the old folks’ home expanded. This is not about who’s gonna get the schools rebuilt better. This is not about who is going to fix the potholes.
This was about Obamacare. That’s a big-time national issue, and it was huge in the defeat of the Democrat and the victory for the Republican. It was the primary factor in the election, and it was people voting against. They did everything they could, the Democrats did, to try to take Obamacare out of the race, but they couldn’t because people are living it. Cancellations, increased premium costs, copays and deductibles, I mean, there’s nothing about Obamacare that’s positive. There’s nothing about it that wants to make a majority of people vote for anybody who can be tied to it.
The interesting thing, too, about this race — and this is a little piece here from Forbes. “Alex Sink Rides Global Warming Alarmism to Surprise Congressional Defeat.” The Democrats had this global warming talk-athon earlier this week, and they are doing that primarily to raise money, but they actually think they have a winning campaign issue. They don’t yet realize that a majority of people, when everything is frozen over two and three times and the Democrats continue to talk about global warming and climate change, they just don’t get it. They’ve got so much invested in this. It’s like Obamacare, those two issues give the Democrats total control over everything.
Global warming — I’ve got this later in the program — global warming has now found its way onto nutritional labels of food. The Democrats, under the guidance of Moochelle Obama are going to now incorporate global warming facts, characteristics, what have you, in warning labels and nutritional labels on food. And the reason for this is total control over every aspect of people’s lives. It’s just hideous, what these people are doing.
The Forbes story on the global warming aspect. “The national media this morning are calling Democrat Alex Sink’s surprise defeat in a bellwether special Congressional election yesterday a foreboding referendum on Obamacare. Perhaps this is so, but only slightly less noteworthy is Sink supporters’ failed attempt to turn victorious Republican David Jolly’s global warming skepticism into a political albatross.”
James Taylor is the writer of this story for Forbes. He lives in the district. And he said, “Having just moved into Florida’s US House District 13, I was shocked these past two weeks to discover how global warming became the central issue dominating television’s political commercials. Granted, I haven’t been watching much television, as moving from one house to another has been nearly a full-time job. Nevertheless, it seemed I couldn’t go 15 minutes into my limited viewing schedule without seeing the same Sierra Club/League of Conservation Voters commercial excoriating Jolly for being a global warming skeptic.”
The point here is the Democrats lost on two of their fundamental issues. The Democrats were rejected big time on two of the most important issues they are pushing: Obamacare and global warming. And I hope they keep it up. I’m tempted to shut up about it. Global warming is not a winning political issue. They haven’t succeeded. This was my point yesterday, a guy called asking me, “Why are you optimistic?” He said, “I don’t see any hope, Rush. The debt alone dooms this country.”
I said, “If you were sitting where I’m sitting, you’d be optimistic. For 25 years, here, global warming was supposed to be the law of the land and we were supposed to already have laws that dictate the way we live.” When Algore comes out 20 years ago and says, “We’ve only got 10 years or else,” and Ted Danson and all these other wackos?
Global warming was supposed to have secured the Democrat Party majority 15 years ago. But it’s been beaten back. I mean, there are lot of global warming skeptics, but it’s like anything else. Many in the Republican Party have not made a big deal of it. There have been very few of us who’ve really made a big deal of it, but we pushed it back. We kept this from happening. That’s the reason for being optimistic.
Now, in this little bellwether election last night, we found — and the Drive-Bys are not reporting this. AP is strictly relating this election to Obamacare. But this guy at Forbes who lives there has made it known that trying to tag the Republican as a global warming denier — and therefore a tool of Big Oil and a tool of Big Energy and a tool of planetary destruction — bombed out big time.
Sink had a tremendous name recognition advantage over Jolly. Sink’s campaign outspent Jolly, and Sink decided to counter the anti-Obamacare sentiment by defining Jolly as a scientifically dangerous climate change skeptic. Now, if there is any congressional district in America where Democrats should theoretically get the most bang for their buck selling global warming alarmism, this district, Florida 13, should be it.
You know why? Florida 13 is urban, and it is moderate. The Tea Party — and this is crucial, again, in analyzing the outcome. The Tea Party barely exists in Florida 13. Northeastern and Rust Belt snowbirds dominate the demographics, meaning people from New York and Boston, the Northeast, the Upper Midwest where it’s cold. They have fled, and they now live either all or part time in this district.
They’re a bunch of liberals that have moved down, a bunch of supposedly pro-global warming, climate change fanatics. Now, granted they’re moderates, but this is not a district of native-born Floridians. There was no way this guy was supposed to win this. And, okay, so there was an anti-Obamacare sentiment. “Okay, we can counter that,” the Democrats said, “by portraying this guy as a global warming denier!
“Because the voters here are from the Northeast, and we know that they love global warming as an issue,” and it didn’t work, and the Tea Party wasn’t there. I’m just reminding you of Governor Christie at CPAC: “[W]e’ve gotta start talking about what we’re for and not what we’re against,” and the reason I reject that is because you tell people what you’re for when you tell them what you’re against.
I, for one, resent this presumption that by simply opposing Obamacare, you’re against all health care. No. We’re against specific things — and by defining when you’re against something, you are admittedly also informing people about things you’re for. It can’t happen in a vacuum. The final interesting point here is that Jolly didn’t even fight back on the global warming charge.
He didn’t even run any ads saying, “Don’t listen to her! She’s lying!”
He didn’t even touch it. He did not fight back against this constant global warming political onslaught. It didn’t matter. So there are so many assumptions, so much conventional wisdom about the strengths of the Democrats that’s just bogus. And it’s up to people on our side to gut it up here and start being optimistic and confident that we are right about the things that we hold dear. We are right about the things we believe. We are consummately right about the issues on which we have opinions.
Despite the media.
Ignore the media and the conventional wisdom and the daily portrayal.