Toomey: I'm electable! GOP leaders not so sure

As Democrats Arlen Specter and Joe Sestak dig in for a Senate primary that will likely pit power brokers against liberal activists, Republican Pat Toomey has 16 months to sharpen his message of fiscal conservatism for the November 2010 general election.

Toomey, the ex-president of the anti-tax Club for Growth, who nearly unseated Specter in the 2004 Republican primary — and whose renewed challenge this year forced the longtime senator to join the Democrats — is collecting endorsements from GOP leaders and elected officials around the state.

It doesn't hurt that he's the only show in town. Even Republicans who tried to recruit a candidate to challenge Toomey are reluctantly accepting that the former Lehigh Valley congressman is probably going to be their nominee.

"You go to war with the army you have," said Christopher Borick, director of Muhlenberg College's Institute of Public Opinion.

With U.S. Rep. Jim Gerlach, former Gov. Tom Ridge and former U.S. Attorney Pat Meehan rejecting party leaders' requests to enter the Senate race, the GOP is coalescing around Toomey, who represented the Lehigh Valley in Congress from 1999 to 2005.

Toomey, 47, is often characterized - his supporters would say caricatured - as a right-wing ideologue, mainly due to his near-win campaign from the right against Specter in 2004. Specter hung on by less than 2 percentage points.

And, in a Democratic-trending state, the ultra-conservative label is an albatross in the general election, said John McNichol, chairman of the Upper Darby GOP.

It is increasingly difficult for a conservative Republican to get elected statewide in Pennsylvania, where Democrats now outnumber Republicans by 1.2 million voters.

"I think it weakens the general ticket," McNichol said of a Toomey Senate nomination.

However, Toomey was elected three times in a congressional district where Democrats hold the registration advantage. The 15th District, which includes Northampton County and most of Lehigh County, has also backed the Democratic presidential candidate in the last five elections.

"The pundits and all the sophisticated politicos were convinced I was going to lose," Toomey said of his 1998 campaign against Roy Afflerbach, a state senator and later Allentown's mayor. "I beat him - and it wasn't even close."

He won by 10 points.