The most attention has been attracted by Al Schmidt, the insurgent candidate for City Commissioner.   Schmidt, who served as director of the Philly GOP and ran unsuccessfully but seriously for city controller, has garnered a raft of endorsements and appears to have a serious chance of beating Joseph Duda, the incumbent, for the position more or less guaranteed to the minority party.   (The city commissioners are largely invisible, but have the role of supervising elections and maintaining voter rolls, never an insignificant one in Philadelphia.)

Somewhat less,  but still unusual attention has been attracted by John Featherman, the insurgent candidate for Mayor against the insiders’ pick Karen Brown, who might politely be called an uninspiring choice.    Unlike Schmidt, Featherman has no real chance of being elected in November, but the very fact of a GOP primary contest is noteworthy in a city where Flyers’ timeouts usually attract more attention than the Republican Party.

The real issue here, of course, is not the elections themselves but what they signify.  Anyone with passing knowledge of Philadephia knows that the Republican Party, under the perennial leadership of the Meehan family, has been noncompetitive in result and attitude for as long as anyone can remember.    What is new is that the State party, together with a group of mostly younger people loosely associated with the Loyal Opposition movement, has gotten tired of it and is finally doing something about it.    New York, Los Angeles. and other cities with equally high registration disadvantages have competitive Republican parties and have elected Republican mayors in the very recent past.   Why not Philadelphia?

The biggest surprise in PA is that there’s been no surprise. Tom Corbett as a candidate was earnest, a little boring, and talked about cutting spending and keeping down taxes. Tom Corbett as Governor is earnest, a little boring, and is still talking about cutting spending and keeping down taxes.

The State Democratic response is shaping up as a variant of the party’s national strategy: scare up as many constituency groups as possible and hope that Republican overreach, together with a changing economy, will turn things against the GOP. It’s not an especially inspired strategy—one notes an almost complete absence of new ideas—but it could work in the right circumstances. Right now the ideological momentum seems to be in the other direction, with the Republicans making the moves, in Harrisburg and DC, and the Democrats in a more reactive posture. Whether it stays that way remains anyone’s guess, but it’s an astonishing turnaround from where we thought the country and State were headed a few short months ago.

1.  What a difference two years make.  Pennsylvania, which seemed like the bluest of blue states a couple of years ago, will now have a Republican Governor, legislature, and a majority Republican House delegation.   No other state in the country swung so far so fast.

2.  How it happened is as interesting as what happened.  None of the most closely watched races–PA7, PA8, PA11–were really all that close.  Dee Adcock, a swimming pool contractor, got more than 40 percent against Allyson Schwartz (PA 13); with more national help he might have won.

3.  Beyond its immediate implications, all of the above happened just in time for the redistricting process.  Past efforts at drawing partisan districts have not always been successful (see PA-13, above).  But as the say on TV, past results do not guarantee future performance.

Perhaps the Democrats’ most hopeful sign is the turnout gap.  If all the 2008 voters  participated, Toomey loses and perhaps Corbett as well (congressional races are tougher to call).  A small partisan shift, and the return of at least some of those voters, and PA starts to look a lot bluer–or at least purpler–again.

Laura Vecsey suggests the state Republican Party has “co-opted” the Tea Party by nominating candidates who were hard-line right-wingers in the first place.  G. Terry Madonna and Michael Young suggest they’re somewhat more moderate.

I think the truth is a little bit more complicated.

The Tea Party’s strength arises from two sources: anger at the Obama administration and frustration with GOP organizations that either lose elections or offer candidates indistinguishable from their Democratic opponents (think Philadelphia with anybody but Sam Katz running). The second of these is no less important than the first. The frustration is especially great in places like New York or Delaware, where the Republican Party was once rather effective but has in the past generation become much less so.

Part of the reason that the Tea Party has been less successful in Pennsylvania is that the regular Republican Party has never been reduced to powerlessness in the manner of other northeastern states. While the state GOP fared poorly in the 2008 presidential race and the 2006 senate race—and while Ed Rendell cruised to two terms as Governor—the party never really ceased to be a power in Harrisburg, and continues to win down-ballot elections at a reasonable pace.

This, plus the usual “eight-year cycle” put Tom Corbett, if not Pat Toomey, in good shape even before the campaign began. And Arlen Specter’s opportunistic switch of parties meant that the Tea Party stories that would have accompanied Toomey’s inevitable victory in the Republican Party instead became a story of Sestak’s Democratic revolt, based on the now questionable idea that Pennsylvania was too blue a state to tolerate a purple Senator.

While the state GOP’s co-opting—or merely sidestepping—the Tea Party issue bodes well in the short term, the long-term outlook is less clear.    Whatever one thinks of candidates like Christine O’Donnell in Delaware or Carl Paladino in New York, they have injected life into the campaign and seriously jumbled the traditional two-party system. By contrast, the Pennsylvania Republicans remain what they’ve always been: a rather colorless group of mostly white male business types who do well in low- to moderate-turnout elections but tend to run into trouble when everybody shows up.

Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, pay close attention.

But the signs of overconfidence are in the air already. A few particulars:

• The expectations game: A few months ago, the GOP was talking about winning 20-30 seats and maybe, just maybe, gaining control of the House. Now it’s who will be the Speaker when we win, and can we take the Senate as well? There is a danger of creating a situation in which anything less than a wholesale Democratic collapse can be portrayed as a comeback. How  you perform compared to expectations is sometimes no less important than winning—see Clinton, Hillary, Super Tuesday.

• The winning vs. governing problem: No one, absolutely no one, in the GOP expected the party to return to power this soon. The party has all sorts of ideas—on taxes, health care, you name it—but are they ideas that the public will buy into? Already there have been whispers of a government shutdown, not something that anyone with any memory will be enthusiastic about.

• The how to spend your money problem: My Red in a Sea of Blue colleague has excellent and generally sensible posts on how the parties might best invest their money in the remaining weeks of the campaign. But he’s not making the decisions. As the talk of tsunamis and tidal waves builds, the Republicans may be tempted to put more money into races that, deep down, they know they probably aren’t going to win. Is that wise, and is it the best way to build for the future?

Make no mistake, it’s still a great year to be a Republican. But things can, and do, change quickly.

Celebrating before you win is a classic football—and political—mistake.

Some things have changed, some things haven’t.

• It looks like the Democrats are in even more trouble than I imagined they’d be. Who would have thought both Tom Corbett and Pat Toomey would be flirting with double-digit leads, and that Democrats would have a real chance of losing up to half-a-dozen House seats in Pennsylvania alone? No one pretends there’s no Republican wave coming any more.

• The Democratic strategy appears to be to run away from the issues and try to scare people about the Republican candidates (as in Kentucky or Nevada) or else to resort to simple trickery (as in the increasingly pathetic shenanigans emerging from Bryan Lentz’s and Dan Onorato’s campaigns). Such tactics might work in individual cases, but they are likely to backfire in others. If anything, they threaten to anger independent voters without meaningfully increasing the enthusiasm on the Democratic side.

• While the Republicans look strong right now, there is a serious danger of overconfidence, both in the elections themselves and their aftermath. Anyone who attends Republican meetings knows that the party is much longer on resentment of President Obama than on clear and constructive ideas for what to do once in power. There is, moreover, a wide and growing gap between establishment Republicans and Tea Party insurgents, one that is less pronounced in Pennsylvania than in other states, but which will directly impact the party’s ability to function should it take control of Congress. The enthusiasm about “Speaker Boehner” should perhaps be tempered with that old adage: Be careful what you wish for, because it may come true.

• Things looks even worse for the Democrats, in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, than I had thought. Instead of moving back to the center, Democrats have pretty much doubled down on their liberal agenda, like shoppers who know the store is closing and have to cram in every last purchase while they still can. That kind of approach, coupled with anemic economic growth, doesn’t bode well for November.

• While the GOP has a big advantage, it is always possible to blow it. Tom Corbett’s remarks about unemployment are a great example of this phenomenon. The next time Corbett wants to try out his theories of economic behavior, he should call Rick Santorum on a private line, and leave it out of his speeches.

• Joe Sestak letting J Street defend him from the charge of being anti-Israel is a little bit like Shirley Sherrod calling Michael Steele for help with the NAACP. Better to attract attention to something he’s good at, like naval strategy or bashing Arlen Specter. Wait, Specter isn’t running any more, is he?

See you in a week or two.

It seems to me Republicans have a clear, simple argument to make in the 2010 elections. President Obama was elected on a promise to end the war, fix the economy and create a new, less polarized political style. None of these things, to say the least, has happened.

Do you want two (or six) more years of this, or don’t you?

Attempts to personalize the race, or make it a referendum on hot-button issues like immigration, gay rights, etc. are beside the point and carry a strong risk of boomerang. They are, moreover, unnecessary. Lawyers learn to make emotional appeals when the facts and law are against them.

When the facts are in your favor, why bother?

Victories by Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina in California, much like Tom Corbett’s relatively smooth ride to the GOP nomination in Pennsylvania, suggest a moderate, down-to-business attitude that may sell well in a country tired of posturing and anxious for substantive results. Even Scott Brown, elected with Tea Party support in Massachusetts, has proved himself surprisingly moderate.

There are counter-trends as well (Rand Paul stand out in particular), but the overall pattern is not especially threatening.

The rise of Republican women, including Whitman, Fiorina, and Nikki Haley in South Carolina, is another interesting trend.   Anyone who attends local Republican events knows that much of the emotional and organizational energy comes from women, especially those who are active in nonprofit organizations (churches, schools, etc) and the business community. Pennsylvania has historically been slow to recognize female candidates, the state GOP even more so.

Maybe it’s time to catch up.

Yes and no. Obviously the story will boil over, and the race will ultimately be decided on the issues of jobs, the economy, and the future of the country and the State. That is as it should be.

But the whole point of the Obama administration—and in a sense, of Sestak himself—was supposed to be that they would do things differently from their predecessors. It’s hard to see how trying to bribe someone out of a Senate primary—to make way for a former Republican, of all things—constitutes that new approach. Like the 12th District campaign of Democrat Mark Critz, who essentially promised to keep the John Murtha goodies flowing, Democrats are stuck with a call for new politics leveraging what looks a lot like the old corruption.

Not a  very comfortable place to be.

The story also makes the attacks on Pat Toomey look a little off-target. The emerging theme of the Democratic campaign against Toomey is that he’s a Wall Street profiteer who wants to bring his heartless, me-first approach to the Senate. But people on Wall Street at least build things occasionally, along with their frequent mistakes. What exactly was the White House hoping to create by bribing Joe Sestak, and what is the vision for Pennsylvania, and the country, that flows from this kind of behavior?