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The Specter of defeat in PA
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
05/05/09 10:05 AM EDT
Pollsters have been busy in Pennsylvania the week after Senator Arlen Specter’s second party switch (the first one took place in 1966). The results are interesting.
Quinnipiac finds that Specter as a Democrat leads Pat Toomey, the former congressman who held him to a 51%-49% victory in the 2004 Republican primary, by a very big 53%-33% margin. But Specter leads former Governor and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge by a statistically insignificant 46%-43% margin.
A poll conducted for the PEG Political Action Committee, a pro-business group, has somewhat different numbers. It shows Ridge edging Specter 39%-38% and Specter leading Toomey by only 42%-36%. Note that there are about twice as many undecideds in the PEG poll (22%-23%) as in the Quinnipiac poll (11%-12%). Generally, I’m inclined to take high undecideds as a sign of weak interviewing and as a reason for at least mild skepticism.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of similarities between the two polls. Toomey is in the mid 30s in each, a sign of low name identification. Quinnipiac shows 67% haven’t heard enough about him to have either favorable or unfavorable opinions. So he’s a kind of generic Republican, which obviously isn’t a particularly good thing to be in a state that voted 54%-44% for Barack Obama last November. The other similarity is that both polls show a close Specter-Ridge race, within the margin of error.
Quinnipiac provides regional breakdowns, which show the very different regional bases. Specter’s favorable are highest in the two central city counties, Philadelphia and Allegheny (Pittsburgh) and in southeast Pennsylvania, which I assume includes the four suburban Philadelphia counties (Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery), plus the Lehigh Valley, the area around Reading and Lancaster County.
As Jay Cost points out in his www.realclearpolitics.com blog, Specter is very much a Philadelphia candidate, and his regional base is metro Philly. He doesn’t get 50% favorable in any other region and has more unfavorables than favorables in the Northwest and Southwest regions.
Regions are important in Pennsylvania, where at least some years ago the Associated Press kept separate eastern and western Pennsylvania bureaus in the state capital of Harrisburg. Phillies versus Pirates, Eagles versus Steelers. And the regions behave very differently. In the 1980s western Pennsylvania, hard hit by the collapse of U.S.-based steelmakers, voted heavily Democratic while metro Philly trended Republican. George H. W. Bush ran even with Michael Dukakis in metro Philly but way behind in metro Pittsburgh (Allegheny, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Washington and Westmoreland Counties). The culture war politics of the late 1990s sent both areas moving in the opposite directions. Metro Philly trended Democratic while metro Pittsburgh trended Republican. Barack Obama won huge majorities in the suburban Philly counties. But John McCain came very close to carrying metro Pittsburgh, and won a higher percentage there than George W. Bush had in 2004.
The problem facing Specter was that there were fewer and fewer Republican primary voters in his home base than there used to be; the 200,000 voters who changed their registration from Republican to Democratic between 2004 and 2008 were disproportionately concentrated in metro Philly. As Jay Cost pointed out, he ran badly against Toomey in western and central Pennsylvania in the 2004 primary and was obviously going to run even worse there in a 2010 Republican primary. Now those suburban Philly voters who switched are part of his base again—at least he hopes they will be if Congressman Joseph Sestak or some other reasonably prominent Democrat runs against him in the primary.
They certainly are his base in a general election against Toomey. Quinnipiac shows Specter getting 82% in Philly and 55% in the Southeast, which I interpolate to mean that he gets about 64% of the vote in metro Philly—about the same as Obama’s 66%. In contrast, he gets only 40% to 48% in the other regions except Allegheny. That would mean about 49% in metro Pittsburgh, slightly under Obama’s 52%. Statewide, he is running at just about the same level as his favorables (52%), but since his name recognition is nearly universal it’s possible that a competent opponent who starts out little known but raises sufficient money to change that could sweep up the lion’s share of the undecided vote and make this a close race. Conceivably even a winning race, if the balance of partisan opinion changes over the next 18 months.
Against Ridge, who presumably remains well known after his seven years as governor, Specter gets 82% again in Philadelphia but only 48% in the Southeast, for a metro Philly percentage of about 59%--5% behind Obama’s. And he appears to be getting only about 42% in metro Pittsburgh and to be trailing there. Ridge, whose home base is in the small city of Erie in the far northwest, thus shows some affirmative strength in western Pennsylvania and his moderate reputation makes him competitive in the Philly suburbs.
When Specter announced his party switch, my first thought was that he would be pretty hard to beat in a general election. These poll results have changed my mind. He certainly starts off with some advantage but could be overtaken. His weakness in western Pennsylvania is notable. Ridge obviously has some strength as a candidate, but even a largely unknown like Toomey has the potential to be a contender. Moreover, the differences between the Quinnipiac and PEG results suggest to me that a lot of Specter’s current support is soft. In the last two Senate cycles we have seen races which no one thought would be seriously contested end up with the defeat of an incumbent. I think you can’t rule that out in Pennsylvania this time.
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