"Republican candidates understand that the overall political forces are with them . . . and they want to make this a nice, generally low-profile election," said John Kennedy, a political science professor at West Chester University.
Indeed, listing too far right and embracing some of the more radical tea party views - abolishing Social Security, the Department of Education, and the IRS, for example - would likely turn off moderate suburban voters and independents, said G. Terry Madonna, a professor, pollster and political analyst at Franklin and Marshall College.
"In the suburbs, that won't fly," he said. "You can oppose Obama, you can oppose the agenda, you can be against debts and deficits: That's the issue that, among independents, has grown."
Democratic strategists are using far-right candidates who have won GOP primaries to argue that the party is out of the mainstream, even in states like Pennsylvania where the tea party's influence on the Republican Party is less overt.
But so far, moderates in two suburban races seem to be doing just fine.
U.S. Rep. Jim Gerlach, a Republican who has won in some of the tightest races in the nation, opposes other tea party views, such as privatizing Social Security, yet the Independence Hall Tea Party PAC has endorsed him.
Gerlach, whose Sixth Congressional District encompasses parts of Montgomery, Chester and Berks Counties, voted against the stimulus and the health-care packages, which burnished his fiscal-conservative credentials with tea partiers. In his district, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 27,000, he doesn't need to lean any further right.
