Based on these results, it looks to me like 33% of voters surveyed support Toomey, and another 14% are voting against Specter. This suggests to me that Specter will have a huge hill to climb if he wins the Democratic primary.
The Favorable/Unfavorable ratings support this read. Only Specter is in negative territory; many more people know who he is, but more than half the voters disapprove of him:
Arlen Specter: 41 / 52
Pat Toomey: 30 / 18
Joe Sestak: 24 / 14
He may have the time and money to overcome that opposition before November, but then we just get six more years of Senator Arlen Specter.
Clearly, Sestak still faces a huge name-recognition deficit. He may trail Toomey by a bit more than Specter right now, but has much more room to define himself positively before the PA voters. The primary is on May 18, just over a month away. Does Sestak have enough time and money to make up the deficit against Specter? Is there anything we at OpenLeft can do to help?
The Obama campaign's ethical stances are giving the Philly political machine fits. This from the LA Times:
The dispute centers on the dispensing of "street money," a long-standing Philadelphia ritual in which candidates deliver cash to the city's Democratic operatives in return for getting out the vote. Flush with payments from well-funded campaigns, the ward leaders and Democratic Party bosses typically spread out the cash in the days before the election, handing $10, $20 and $50 bills to the foot soldiers and loyalists who make up the party's workforce. It is all legal -- but Obama's people are telling the local bosses he won't pay.
The assumption by many quoted in the article is that these foot soldiers will work for Clinton instead.
Neither the Clinton nor the Obama campaign would say publicly whether it would comply with Philadelphia's street money customs. But an Obama aide said Thursday that it had never been the campaign's practice to make such payments. Rather, the campaign's focus is to recruit new people drawn to Obama's message, the aide said. The field operation "hasn't been about tapping long-standing political machinery," the aide said.
Obama's campaign has been grass-roots oriented and I would be surprised if this stance really costs him but many experts on PA politics think it will.
STATE BLOGS
