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Specter’s Santorum Syndrome

by Tom Ferrick

By TOM FERRICK

Is Arlen Specter suffering from the Rick Santorum Syndrome?

That’s my name for the malady that inflicts an incumbent whose negatives are so deep and fixed among voters that he cannot convince them to support him—no matter how much time, money and effort he puts into changing their minds.

Naturally, it’s named in honor of the former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania—that irrepressible conservative, Rick Santorum. By the time his re-election rolled around in 2006, the Republican incumbent had so infuriated key blocks of voters they would have supported any credible candidate who stood to oppose him, except maybe Saddam Hussein.

Alas for Santorum, Bob Casey—a credible, popular Democrat with a gilt-edged name—decided to run. In one of the first polls done (a Quinnipiac poll taken in July 2005), Casey bested the incumbent 50% to 39%.

Seventeen months later—after Santorum spent more than $20 million on his campaign—Casey beat Santorum in the November election 58 percent to 41 percent. To put it another way, it cost Santorum $10 million for each point of improvement in his standings.

To be clear, Santorum was popular among his core supporters. The last public poll taken before the 2006 general election showed him with 87 percent of the Republican vote. His problem was with Democrat and Independent voters, who constitute the majority in this state.

Arlen Specter has the reverse problem. He is popular among Democrats and Independents, but he is in trouble with this fellow Republicans. In the latest Quinnipiac poll (March 25), Specter’s approval rating among Republicans was only 36 percent. Fifty-two percent disapproved of his performance and 12 percent were undecided.

Worse for Specter: in the Quinnipiac head-to-head, Pat Toomey, his challenger in the 2010 Republican primary, got 41 percent to Specter’s 27 percent, with 28 percent undecided.

Look at those numbers and you may think: Well, Toomey’s ahead, but there is a large bloc of undecideds and Specter has the time and money to catch up.

True enough, unless Specter has a bad case of RS Syndrome— that is, if his negatives among likely Republican voters are so deep and fixed that there isn’t enough time or money to get them to support him.

The last time Specter and Toomey faced off in a GOP primary was in 2004. Specter won by a margin of 17,146 votes out of 1,004,532 cast. Now that’s close.
Since then, things have changed for the worse for the Republican incumbent in two important ways.

The first has to do with the numbers. There are fewer Republicans today than there were in 2004 and most of the defectors are GOP moderates. In the five-county Philadelphia area, which is Specter’s home base, the party has 124,000 fewer Republican voters today than the last time Specter faced Toomey. Democrats and Independents are ineligible to vote in the GOP primary.

The second has to do with the Republican state of mind. After getting shellacked last November, the Republicans are over their denial stage (Barack Obama is, in fact, the President of the United States), but they are still in their anger stage.

The message has gone forth that the party must redeem itself by returning to its conservative roots and core Republicans (read: the ones who vote in primaries) have no time for blasphemers. Enter Arlen Specter, who proceeds to vote for the Obama financial stimulus package. Woe betide him!

Specter has been out of sync with the core of his party for decades. He is, after all, a political moderate who tilts liberal on Culture War social issues. That’s how he ended up with a 71 percent approval rating among Democrats in the latest Quinnipiac poll.

But, this is a particularly bad time to be out of sync, especially given the fact that Toomey is an energetic, pro-life, anti-tax-and-spend candidate who offers Republican voters an attractive alternative.

A third Republican, Peg Luksik, an anti-abortion warrior who has run statewide three times before, has also said she will run. If I were Specter, I’d get my supporters contribute to her campaign. Getting Luksik into double-digits in the primary may be the only way he survives it. But I see Luksik as a single-digit candidate who will be judged a spoiler by conservatives, who will attack her for aiding and abetting the Blasphemer.

The other option Specter has is to try to change the conversation, get the focus off him and his record and try to make the race about Toomey. He’s already begun that effort. The other week, he went up with a $100,000 flight of TV ads hitting Toomey for his years on Wall Street.

Santorum tried the same thing in his race against Casey, with several costly flights of nasty, but clever ads aimed at the Democrat. But that’s another aspect of the Rick Santorum Syndrome —the race is not about your opponent. It is not about issues. It is about you.

Try as you might, you cannot shift the spotlight somewhere else. Now, those hot lights are focused on Arlen Specter.

The writer is a former political reporter and metro columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer who covered Arlen Specter’s first race for the U.S. Senate in 1976.

April 21, 2009 at 12:23 pm

--Tom Ferrick

Tags: Arlen Specter, Pat Toomey, Peg Luksik, Rick Santorum

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