PENN. SEN. PRIMARY

(back in Santa Barbara)

With 85% of precincts in, Republican challenger Pat Toomey holds an 85-vote lead over Senator Arlen "Magic Bullet" Specter, according to this site.

Democratic candidate Joe Hoeffel should have a good chance to beat either candidate. The Repub primary campaign has apparently been an "I'm the bigger Republican!" pissing contest, so whoever wins will have a lot to answer for in the general election. I'll update this when a winner has been declared...

UPDATE: Specter by a few thou with 89% in, but it's still 50-50

ANOTHER UPDATE: 96% in, Specter leads by 16k. That should be it. Yep, race has been called.

What does this mean? It means that in the general election, Democrat Joe Hoeffel will be facing a bruised and battered incumbent who barely survived the primary. In said primary, Specter, known for his somewhat moderate voting record, had to run further to the right than he ever had to in a campaign, so this will provide some decent ammunition for Hoeffel. Certainly, the name "Santorum" will come up.

Also, Kos notes:

[W]ord on the street is that the Bush campaign is using today as a test run for its PA GOTV effort, all on behalf of Specter

(GOTV = "get out the vote", for the uninitiated) So this means that all the Bush people could muster was a win for an incumbent by only a few thousand votes. But if Florida taught us anything, then to these guys, a win is a win is a win! (even if the actual win itself is in question)

Though I'm not hugely mired in Pennsylvania politics -- my closest connection to the Keystone State is that my mother was born there back in the FDR administration -- I'd say that the situation turned out pretty well for the Democrats. Toomey, who ran a great campaign and is a reasonably charismatic guy from what little I saw of him, might have given Hoeffel a lot more trouble given that A) he didn't have to BS Pennsylvania Republicans into getting their votes and B) Pennsylvania isn't unwilling to elect far-right senators (Santorum). But he's gone. Instead we get the Bush-backed candidate, who won with only 51% of the Republican vote despite the Bush team's GOTV effort, and who produced a lot of ad-ready fodder in the primary campaign, in a state that, like others in the Great Lakes region, has taken the brunt of the recession. We'll see how this goes...