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.

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.

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.

• CNN: Republicans Win First Election Showdown of the Year
• Fox: Republican David Jolly Beats Alex Sink in Florida Special Election
• Boston Herald: Health care law gets 1st test in Florida election
• Town Hall: Obama to Latino Town Hall: Cut Cable, Cell Phone to Afford ACA Plan
• Forbes: Alex Sink Rides Global Warming Alarmism to Surprise Congressional Defeat in FL-13
• Roll Call: The Race Democrats Can’t Afford to Lose -- Stu Rothenberg
• Examiner: Debbie Wasserman Schultz: GOP 'underperformed' by winning Fla. special election
• National Journal: Why a Republican Wave in 2014 is Looking More Likely Now
• AP: Fla. House Race Could Be Warning for Democrats

RUSH: You know, I did want to spend just a couple of more minutes on this Florida special election. There are abundant lessons here for the Republican establishment to learn, a bunch of things to glean here that would help them going forward. Reviewing the campaign is one of the best ways, I think, to impart some of the lessons.

One of the other factors, independents, the precious -- oh, we love them so much -- independents made up 25% of the votes. Jolly won those, too. The Republican won the independents, and that's what the consultants say you have to do. This is a moderate district, lot of snowbirds, a lot of transplanted moderates, liberals from the Northeast have moved and live there. That's why the Democrats thought that their global warming spiel would work to counter the negatives of Obamacare.

You know what else? David Jolly was a lobbyist for offshore drilling. I mean, you can't be a bigger target than that for a Democrat campaign. My God, this is everything. A lobbyist for offshore drilling! And not the Ted Kennedy kind. This is oil drilling that he's a lobbyist for. Now, in the conventional wisdom playbook, that's supposed to be a death warrant in a political campaign, and he didn't lose. There was an anti-David Jolly editorial back in January, Tampa Bay Times. " Both Jolly, a Republican candidate for US House District 13, and Lucas Overby, his Libertarian opponent, are refusing to acknowledge the overwhelming scientific evidence that humans have had an extensive impact on climate change and by extension, rising tides in Pinellas County and elsewhere."

So, I mean, they laid it on full bore. That is just journalistic malpractice. Well, it's an editorial, but whoever wrote it is a full-fledged idiot. Okay, so Jolly and the Libertarian refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming scientific evidence that humans have had. There is no such evidence! 
There's no evidence that humans -- it's an open question. If there was evidence humans had caused it, then there wouldn't be a debate.

If there was evidence, you couldn't refute it. There isn't any evidence that humans cause the climate to change. Nobody's disputing the climate changes. But we're not causing it. We don't have that power. We do not have the ability. And the proof is we can't fix it. We can't stop it once it's doing one thing or the other, warming or cooling. We can't stop it. So how can we cause it?

The other thing about this global warming, and I think this is a fundamental point, and admittedly it may be over the head of your average low-information voter. But for this global warming argument that the left makes to work, there has to be an unquestioned truth, or assumption, and that is that whatever was going on 10 years ago is normal and the way God intended or the way nature intended. At some point you have to be able to say, "This is the normal for planet Earth," so that you can measure warming or cooling. There's no evidence of what normal is. There hasn't been record taking long enough for anybody to say what is normal. Are the ice ages normal? Are Dust Bowls normal?

We define normal based on our comfort. But is that what's normal? We don't know what the point is that if it's getting cooler we got a problem, and if it's getting warmer we've got a problem. We just assume that at the moment in time that we happen to populate the planet it happens to be normal. There's so much wrong with that. Scientifically there's so much wrong. You can refute practically every claim made because every claim is political. You can refute it with logic. So I think when you have an editorial like the Tampa Bay Times, it's just a bit of evidence of how corrupt journalism school has become, how corrupt the left is. The overwhelming scientific evidence that man causes -- there isn't any evidence that man causes it.

There is an attempt to make people believe it with contrived evidence. That's what the e-mails from the East Anglia University demonstrated, that the climate scientists are making it up. They are ignoring things that disprove their theory, and they're making up things that prove their theory. There isn't any science. The next thing that needs to be touted is, science is not consensus. Science is not up for a vote. It's not a political contest to win. But that's what it's become. That's why I asked the question: Why is whether it's getting warmer or cooler political? That question alone to me ought to alert everybody that they're being caught up in a hoax.

People intrinsically hate politics, don't they? They hate lobbyists, they hate all of this. They like the goodies they get, but they don't like it. They don't think it's honest. They think they get screwed. Why, then, do they choose to believe certain elements of the industry they all despise? 
They don't think politicians are honest; they don't think politicians really care about 'em. That's another thing. Now, I'm making a detour here. I've leaving the Jolly race 'cause a bulb went off in the brain. You know the exit poll question. There were two in the 2012 presidential race. When I saw the first wave at five o'clock, that's when we got the first wave in 2012. When I saw them, I said, "We're finished."

The first one was that almost 58% of voters still blame Bush for the economy. I said, "Well, it's over." The second one, and even worse, was in the question, "cares for people like me," Obama 81, Romney 19. And for the first time I think this is safe to say, in exit polling data, and not just exit polling, in terms of Election Day, but polling afterwards, what normally wins is whoever voters think is the most competent leader. That question, whoever prevails in that question generally has won the presidential election. This one, 2012 I think was one of the first -- if not the first, it's one of the few -- where the empathy question defined the winner. And that signals a significant societal shift in what people want out of their president. "Cares about people like me."

That is evidence of the corruption of our culture throughout education and entertainment, pop culture, "cares about people like me." Well, the Republicans never win that one. Even Republicans that have been elected president always lose in that. And therein lies one of the biggest challenges the Republicans have, is convincing people they care about them. If you want to talk about Republican branding that's gone wrong, that's probably it in a nutshell, that Republicans don't care about people. They care about the rich, and that no matter how incompetent the Democrats are, doesn't matter, 'cause they at least care.

And then that feeds into all of this equality and fairness and all these other things that really have nothing to do with leadership. But even that, the Democrats tried characterizing David Jolly as a pro-offshore drilling lobbyist and a global warming denier, he doesn't care about you, and it didn't work. So I'm telling you that there are all kinds of lessons for the Republican establishment, and the Tea Party, too. Anybody that wants to win elections in this cycle, there's all kinds of lessons to be learned from this one.

The global warming thing, I don't know why the Republicans haven't been more vocal because, to me, it's so easy to refute it. I know we have our scientists that are trying to refute it that way, and God bless them. But the people that support it don't know the science. The people that support it are brain-dead. They're caught up in the emotion of it. They are accepting blame for causing it.

And then they are accepting that carrot out there that they can be absolved for this sin if they agree to pay higher taxes and drive a clunky little car and whatever other price they have to pay, and give up some of their freedom. I mean, to me, it's just so commonsensical. This is a farce, and that big question: How do we know what is normal? What kind of vanity do we have?

How many human beings have walked this earth over however many years it's been here? Whatever you believe, where do we get off saying that in our 85 years of life expectancy is what's normal for the earth and that's the way it should be? We don't know that. We don't know that there even is a normal, because the climate of Planet Earth is in a state of constant flux.

So we're gonna define "normal" by where we're most comfortable? Well, I'm sorry, that doesn't even work, 'cause frankly we, down here, have had a very comfortable winter. It's been fabulous. As far as we're concerned, this could be normal all the time. And most of this country has frozen its behind off! There is no normal. There is no automatic, "This is the way it was intended to be." We don't know that.

So any so-called evidence that it's getting warmer or cooler from that point is bogus. The whole thing is made up. Now they're inculcating all of this with Michelle's push into healthy foods, by determining how food is created, produced, grown, whatever. It's gotta be done in a "green" fashion. That's gonna raise prices. It's ostensibly gonna be healthier and so forth.

But it's just gonna end up taking away food choice from people, and it's gonna raise prices like crazy. And it's all based on the presumption you don't know how to eat right; you don't know what's good for you. But it's really based on more than that. They just want to control every aspect of your life, and it's what they're aiming for.

RUSH: I want to zip back to global warming for a second because you listen to the right Democrats -- John Kerry, Obama -- they're out there and they are saying that climate change is the greatest existential threat facing the planet today. The greatest existential threat facing the planet. Now, there are some real violators. For example, India, the ChiComs, the Russians, Brazil, they are all huge polluters. They're all worse than we are.

Every one of those countries is worse in terms of CO2 emissions than we are. They all happen to be growing their economies at near record paces, by the way. CO2 emissions accompany economic growth. Are we willing to go to war with 'em if they don't cut back on their emissions? I mean, they're out there trying to make you think it's the greatest threat we face, other than the Tea Party, greatest threat we face. Now, you've got a bunch of people out there that are part of the greatest threat we face, climate change. Somebody ought to ask Kerry, "Are we ready to go to war, if it's this big a threat?" Just trying to make a point, folks. All of this is just so trumped up, and it's all designed to scare everybody.

• CNN: John Kerry: Climate Change as Big a Threat as Terrorism, Poverty, WMDs
• RushLimbaugh.com: GOP Must Fight Twin Hoaxes of Climate Change and Obamacare -- 12.09 09
• Sierra Club: Is David Jolly with Big Oil of Florida?
• Tampa Bay Times: Editorial: David Jolly, Lucas Overby wrong on climate change
• Forbes: Alex Sink Rides Global Warming Alarmism to Surprise Congressional Defeat in FL-13