The first poll on the Pennsylvania general election for Senate since Joe Sestak began rising in the polls is out. It completely destroys the idea that Arlen Specter is more electable than Joe Sestak:
Rassmusen, May 6th, 1,000 "likely voters" (April 12th numbers in parenthesis)
Toomey: 50 (50)
Specter: 38 (40)
Other: 7 (5)
Toomey: 42 (47)
Sestak: 40 (36)
Other: 10 (7)
This campaign is being looped into a general "purge" narrative of hard-core ideologues dumping incumbent Senators in primary (or some such whining). However, on a purely pragmatic level, at this point, it would be electoral suicide for Democrats not to nominate Joe Sestak for Senate in Pennsylvania. If Specter is able to come back and pull this primary out, Democrats will start in a big hole. By comparison, with Sestak, they are only 2% behind in a Rasmussen poll. Given that Rasmussen has had a roughly 6% "house effect" in favor of Republicans this year, it is likely that Sestak is now leading in the general election against Toomey.
Sestak has gained 9% on Toomey over the past month, while Specter has lost 2%. And really, why wouldn't Sestak have also made up ground in the general election during a period when he gained in the primary? His gain has come almost entirely because of positive bio ads (the negative ads have gotten the attention, but the positive bio ads have gotten a lot more airtime) that have significantly raised his name ID and favorable rating in the state. Specter, by contrast, is extremely well known, and people's minds are made up about him.
Returning to whining moderates for a moment, let me get on a rant to the pundits talking about primary "purges": stop pretending that the incumbent Democrats who have found themselves in trouble primaries are principled "moderates" in any way. Could it be more glaringly obvious at this point that Arlen Specter is an opportunist who seeks mainly to save his own job? Can you please try and remember that Blanche Lincoln systematically lied to virtually every Democratic constituency (see here for women, labor and health care advocates, then see here for African-Americans) before those groups started recruiting a primary challenger? And can you recall that Joe Lieberman flip-flopped on perhaps the biggest progressive grassroots advocacy campaign of the past decade just to beat progressives for the sake of it?
The fact is that the progressive base is neither large enough, nor powerful enough, to defeat incumbent Democrats in primaries just on the basis of abstract ideological disagreement. We can only beat conservative and moderate Democrats in primaries when those Democrats also happen to be wankers. And while the Senate is full of wankers, Arlen Specter, Joe Lieberman and Blanche Lincoln have acting in particularly wankerific fashion over the past few years. We progressives wouldn't have a shot in any of these campaigns if we were dealing with principled politicians who let you know where they stand and / or who actually put their constituents above their own careers.
The lies, the flip-flops, the glory-seeking, the vindictiveness, the cynicism--without all that, progressives would not have a chance to beat Democratic incumbents in primaries. At least for right now, we can only beat the wanker conservatives.
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