Poll: Specter Unpopular In Pennsylvania, Trailing Toomey Among Likely Voters

9 months ago Specter was ahead of Toomey.

Fast forward and now Toomey is ahead of Specter.

We have 9 months to change that around.

I want a third option. Specter is unreliable and not always truthful. Who needs another Lieberman? Pennsylvania has trouble providing quality candidates, it seems, in either party.

Once the primary is over and Democrats see that Toomey is the second coming of Rick Santorum, they'll rally around the Democratic nominee.

this was so utterly predictable and predicted.

PA is throughly fucked for 2010.

It took us 12 freaking years to get rid of that idiot Santorum, and now it looks like we're going to have to spend the NEXT 12 years trying to get rid of his ideological clone, Toomey.

Major bummer for us Keystoners.

This is why they have primaries. But once the primary ends, PA Dems need to not shoot themselves (and the rest of us) in the foot. Support whomever wins the primary. For all his faults, Specter has been a heck of a lot more reliable a Dem than several others that we can easily think of.

Wait till Specter or Sistak start reminding voters that Toomey is the candidate launched by the Club For Growth, the PAC of corporate America. It'll be time to remind voters that the seat is "the people's seat" and not "corporate America's seat".

In this year of anti-incumbency fever, there is no way Specter can win. His biggest problem is with Democratic women who remember that he supported Clarence Thomas for the SC & basically painted Anita Hill as a whore & liar in the confirmation hearings. Add to this that he was probably the biggest senate mover in killing Prez Clinton's national healthcare effort.

Sestak, who has little name recognition outside his district, would be a strong candidate against RW nut Toomey. He appears & acts senatorial, is generally progressive (unlike Specter who changes positions with the tide if it benefits him) & has core beliefs.

It seems like Toomey has been fairly smart about repackaging himself as a guy who is focused on debt and spending and "waste", (issues that are primarily animating both the Tea Party activists and the more moderate independents) as opposed to pushing divisive social issues to the forefront, a la Santorum. People closer to the ground and media markets in PA could better confirm if that's how Toomey is coming across. But I don't think you could've taken a long-cultivated defection by one of the last moderate Rs and just blown it off. Sounds like a lot of pointless post-hoc second-guessing to me. If the argument is that Specter is hobbled by being so obviously desperate to do anything to hold on to his seat then the Democrats spurning him might easily have pushed him to pander back hard to the right -- doing that might not have worked for him, but look how reliable he's been to Dems once he switched and needed to clear the D primary. I know virtually everyone on here regards the senate health care reform bill as about the worst legislation the body's ever produced (and I'm not thrilled by lot about it, too). But Dems needed Spector's vote to even get that much through. With a smaller majority Democrats would have automatically done everything bolder, stronger, more progressive, via reconciliation? Or would have just gone and eliminated the filibuster entirely? Don't be so sure. The idea you can get a comprehensive bill through via reconciliation without having half of it carved out by the parliamentarian is wishful thinking...I'd say the Dems were lucky to have sixty votes while they did. Did it make repulsive pseudo-Dems like Ben Nelson too pivotal? Sure. But there are certain things you can't do without sixty votes. Spector's defection was on balance a good thing.