Libs Laying Groundwork to Sink RINO Specter

HT to PAWaterCooler contributors:



Arlen Specter with his two options: become an independent like Lieberman or hope this Alaskan makes a few trips to PA. (Photo by Flickr user scriptingnews. Creative Commons License.)

Hometown Senator in a lot of trouble

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 8:19 am - by Dan Pohlig. Filed under: Politics.

With former congressman Pat Toomey’s revelation that he is seriously considering jumping over from the governor’s race to take on 16-term Senator Arlen Specter, the blogosphere is abuzz with possible scenarios.

Full disclosure: In 2004, I was the Issues Director for Congressman Joe Hoeffel who ran unsuccessfully against Senator Specter in the general election. Specter won that general by about 11 percent of the vote after squeaking by in the primary against Toomey. At the time, we on the Hoeffel campaign clearly liked our chances against Toomey better but considered it pretty unthinkable - at least early on - that the guy could win. As that primary approached, however, and the polls showed some tightening, it became clear that it would be a dogfight.

Earlier today I was in touch with some former colleagues from that race and one local Democratic operative about some number crunching that the operative had done to compare the PA GOP electorate of 2004 with 2008. Going county-by-county, his worked showed that while the GOP grew overall by about 13K between ‘04 and ‘08 (by contrast, the Democratic Party grew by over 700,000K after starting with a 500,000K lead in 2004), most of that growth was in counties that Toomey won or came very close to Specter.

Going county by county, he also extrapolated what the changes in registration totals would mean for each candidate. For example, in Bucks County, Arlen Specter got 31,971 votes to Toomey’s 25,139 in 2004. By 2008, the number of Bucks County Republicans had dropped by nearly 8 percent. Simply assuming that Specter still gets 55 percent of the remaining votes means that he loses 543 votes from his overall margin. Do this county by county and the result is that Specter loses almost half of his 17,000 vote margin.

And that assumes that the loss of Republicans in some counties and the gain in others is shared evenly between Specter and Toomey. It’s not a big leap to say that almost all of the 8 percent of voters who are no longer Bucks County GOP voters were Arlen Specter voters. So just by the numbers Specter seems to be in a tough spot.


The Bitter American takes Pohlig to task:

1 - The picture: this is what marketers call "product placement." Place Specter with two people the Dumb-o-crats consider "losers:" Lieberman and Palin

2 - They can't even mention Palin's name? WTF?

3 - If GOVERNOR PALIN stumps for anybody in Pennsylvania, it'll be for pro-lifer and REAL Republican Pat Toomey.

4 - Pohlig's Bucks County numbers assumes a trend towards Democratization. If the Obamistake continues to run this country into the ground, the backlash will make the DNC's head spin (It's Howard Dean, so that's probably happeneing anyway - YEA-A-ARGH!)