BLUE BELL, Pa. — To understand Republicans’ nagging fear that the Nov. 2 elections might not be quite the massive triumph that many have predicted, take a look at Pennsylvania’s perplexing Senate race.
Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak has trailed Republican Pat Toomey for months, and a GOP victory has seemed likely, given that it’s a Republican- trending year in this perpetually contested state.
But recent polls suggest Sestak has closed the gap, and Republican leaders are imploring supporters not to panic even as they ask themselves: What’s going on?
The Sestak-Toomey race mirrors other contests that are making this one of the most intriguing and unpredictable midterm elections in years.
Just as in Nevada, Colorado, Kentucky and perhaps Alaska and Connecticut, each candidate is an accomplished but imperfect politician, and the Tea Party movement is playing a big but uncertain role.
While California and Washington see Senate GOP challengers creeping up on Democratic incumbents, it’s embattled Democrats who seem to be rising elsewhere. They have seized on a common claim: A dangerous fringe movement, the Tea Party, has taken over the Republican Party.
Unlike the Republican nominees in Colorado and Nevada, Pennsylvania’s Toomey fits more comfortably in the GOP’s business-friendly, low-tax tradition than in the hot-blooded, anti-establishment Tea Party model. Still, he has accepted Tea Party champion Sarah Palin’s endorsement.
Sestak is using that fact — plus, curiously, the notoriety of Tea Partyer Christine O’Donnell, the GOP Senate nominee in neighboring Delaware — to paint Toomey as a pilot of a new and scary Republican Party veering dangerously to the fringe.
In speeches and ads, Sestak ties Toomey to O’Donnell, the headline-grabbing Tea Partyer who trails her Senate race by double digits in Delaware polls. In a debate Wednesday, Sestak said he worries about “those extreme candidates” who take advantage of “the extreme fringe of the Tea Party. There are those that are running with Congressman Toomey. Miss O’Donnell next door, for example.”
In Alaska’s complex race, it’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski slapping the too-extreme label on Joe Miller, the Tea Party favorite who denied her the GOP nomination. Murkowski is trying a write-in campaign, while Democrat Scott McAdams seems to be running third.
Some analysts see two other factors helping Sestak and Democrats elsewhere:
• Democrats are thought to have a superior get-out-the- vote operation in many states, and the latest polls might be reflecting the heavy contact of voters by phone and door-knocking.
• Democratic leaders have said their voters will “wake up” when they realize what’s at stake, and some analysts think that’s happening now.
Many Republicans scoff at these claims, saying a powerful tide of voter anger still runs heavily in their favor.
To be sure, Sestak has his own problems, just as Sen. Harry Reid has poor approval ratings in Nevada, and Sen. Michael Bennet struggles to defend his support of President Barack Obama in Colorado.
In a televised debate in Pittsburgh on Friday, Sestak defended Obama’s stimulus spending. He said mainstream economists believe 8 million more jobs would have disappeared without the blend of middle-class tax cuts and help for cash-strapped state governments and the unemployed.
Toomey said three years of halving payroll taxes would have been more effective, by making it less costly for businesses to hire new workers.
The GOP nominee is trying to keep some distance from Tea Party activists while embracing more traditional Republicans. He welcomed former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani at a small rally Friday in a fire station in Blue Bell, northwest of Philadelphia.
