Let me enter here all the usual and appropriate caveats. This is one poll; others may not show similar movement. Rasmussen’s likely voter screen tends to produce somewhat more pro-Republican results than other pollsters. The poll was taken while Specter was getting lots of back talk in town hall meetings. We’re 15 months away from the election. Toomey is not known in depth by most voters. You may want to add other caveats as well.
Still, this looks a lot like an earthquake to me. You rarely see such a startling change in poll numbers in such a short time, absent some pivotal event in a high-profile campaign period. Pennsylvania, remember, is a state that voted, narrowly, for John Kerry and Al Gore as well as more robustly for Barack Obama. It’s a state with many blue collar workers and with voters who are conservative on cultural issues but liberal on economic issues. If there’s a state that we might assume is loaded with voters looking for economic programs that will help them, it’s Pennsylvania.
But apparently they’re not buying what Obama and congressional Democrats are selling. Pat Toomey has not been running hundreds of thousands of dollars in ads in Pennsylvania, as advocates of the Democratic health care plans have. Yet he’s risen from 39% to 48% in the polls. It’s not because Pennsylvania voters have developed a devotion to Toomey and are putting pictures of him on their mantelpieces. It’s because, one must assume, they take him as an opponent of the health care proposals Specter has been defending.
Back when Specter switched parties, Obama and Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell promised that they’d support him in a Democratic primary for the seat and in the general election as well. Looks like he may need more than they can deliver.
Rasmussen shows him leading Congressman Joseph Sestak in the Democratic primary by only 47%-34%. Given the relatively high fluidity of voters in primary contests, where they don’t have to cross party lines when they change their minds, and given the fact that Sestak starts off not very well known, these are a warning sign for Specter. Low name and substantive identification helps to explain why Toomey leads Sestak in Rasmussen’s current poll by only 43%-35%, with a relatively high 22% not supporting either candidate.
In my Wednesday Examiner column, I wrote that Democratic leaders have been assuming that economic distress makes voters more supportive of big government programs and that the 53% who voted for Obama would enthusiastically support the programs he supports. These Pennsylvania numbers make a powerful case that these assumptions were wrong.
