US Senator Arlen Specter seized headlines in April last year by quitting the Republican party to become a Democrat. This week he may grab them again by losing the very re-election bid he had hoped to save.
Specter could become another high-profile casualty of angry US voters eager to punish incumbents in a handful of primaries tomorrow, ahead of November elections in which being “from Washington” may be potent political poison.
The races in Arkansas, Kentucky, Oregon and Specter’s home state of Pennsylvania, and a special election in Hawaii on Saturday, come as recent polls show that the climate for incumbents has not been this toxic since 1994.
US President Barack Obama’s Republican critics, who routed Democrats that year, have high hopes but face an internal party insurrection by arch-conservative “Tea Party” activists irate over policies like the government’s 2008 bailout of big banks.
Democrats face an historic pattern of the sitting president’s party losing about two dozen seats in mid-term elections — and have more swing seats to defend because of wins in 2006 and 2008.
And just one in three US voters wants to send their representative back to Washington, according to a Washington Post/ABC survey conducted late last month that spelled trouble for both parties.
Republican Kentucky voters are set to hand “Tea Party” darling Rand Paul the party’s Senate nod over Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s hand-picked favorite, Trey Grayson, Kentucky’s secretary of state.
Paul — whose father, Republican Representative Ron Paul, ran for president in 2008 — has openly capitalized on disaffection with Washington, repeatedly urging voters to “send some different Republicans” to the capital.
“Being an incumbent this year, of either party, is not a happy thing,” former Republican Senate majority leader Trent Lott told reporters last month.
Specter, 80, has the support of Obama and Pennsylvania’s Democratic establishment in his neck-and-neck race against Democratic Representative Joe Sestak, a retired admiral who enjoys the backing of the party’s liberal base.
“We’re in a dead heat,” Sestak said, predicting that Democratic voters in Pennsylvania “do not want to send back to Washington a career politician who will pursue the broken deal-making” that soured them on politics.
Angry voters “are saying ‘a pox on both your houses.’ They are voting in response to broken politics, not policy,” Sestak said.
Recent polls show both Specter and Sestak running behind Republican hopeful Pat Toomey.
The closely watched fights follow a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll packed with grim tidings for Democrats, who have hemorrhaged independent voter support since the 2006 election that gave them control of the US Congress.
Overall, respondents are evenly split on which party should hold Congress, but voters most committed to casting ballots in November prefer Republicans by a lopsided 56-36 percent margin.
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