Last Thursday night on the Senate floor, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., told Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, then still a Republican, that DeMint would be supporting Specter’s rival, former Rep. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., in next year’s Senate Republican primary. DeMint says Specter “pretty much cut me off and said, ‘I’ve heard enough.’ ”
DeMint wouldn’t speculate whether this conversation spurred Specter’s party switch, but it came within hours of a poll release showing Toomey winning among primary voters 51 percent to 30 percent. “We knew Pat was going to win the primary,” DeMint said in a Capitol Hill interview minutes after Specter announced his move. “This [party switch] shouldn’t surprise anyone. It was a clever political move.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the Senate majority leader, told reporters Tuesday that Specter was frank: Politics, not policy, caused the switch. “This is a Pennsylvania story, about his inability, according to his pollster, to be renominated by the Republican Party or to be elected as an independent. And so he made a totally political decision.”
DeMint said, “This shows that there were not principles attaching Arlen to the Republican Party, but the Republican Party was the means to get elected.”
Toomey had speculated earlier that Specter might leave the party before the primary, because Pennsylvania has a “sore loser law” preventing failed primary candidates from running for the same office on a different party line.
Specter appeared to lack the large GOP support he enjoyed in his 2004 primary against Toomey. Five years ago, then-Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., flew around the state to help Specter among social conservatives and pro-life voters disenchanted with Specter’s pro-choice record.
Santorum’s saving Specter deflated Santorum’s pro-life base and contributed to the junior senator’s mammoth defeat for re-election in 2006.
Also, Specter’s crucial support in February of the $787 billion stimulus bill — the largest spending bill in history — infuriated the conservative base and angered Republican leaders.
Although Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, vocally endorsed Specter last month, GOP willingness to support Specter was weaker this year than it was in the 2004 cycle.
