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The winner of the election that the Los Angeles Times has described as “a proxy fight over the GOP’s ideological direction” was decided shortly before 1 a.m. today, when Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter squeaked past right-wing challenger U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Toomey by a margin of just 16,000 votes.
As Knight-Ridder’s Steve Goldstein (registration required) noted, “The Republican right failed last night to exorcise the man it views as the party’s demon.”
In a disconnect that Campaign Desk first observed during the Democratic presidential primaries, both the press and pols declared this contest to be both one of the most closely-watched primary challenges in the nation and a possible signpost pointing to the future – yet voters could barely stay awake, or be bothered to actually cast a ballot. Only about 1.2 million of Pennsylvania’s 3.1 million registered Republicans voted.
Despite that, the Times’ Janet Hook called the contest “a high-profile test of strength between the party’s staunchest conservatives and its dwindling moderate wing – an ideological division that Bush had tried to straddle by defining himself as a `compassionate conservative.’ ”
With the final vote count – and Toomey’s concession speech – not coming until after midnight, Campaign Desk is willing to cut the political reporters of America a little slack on their initial dispatches. But we sure want to see them take a second crack at the race they touted as a High Noon between the GOP far-right and not-so-far-right.
And what we’d like to see in that day-after story is an examination of this:
Is this ideological chasm supposedly dividing the Pennsylvania GOP real? Or is it the concoction of pollsters and handicappers – and the reporters who listen to them – rather than voters? And if this election was indeed some sort of surrogate for a larger national issue, does that mean no one is going to vote in November?
A harder story to nail down, perhaps. But then, the good ones always are.
–Susan Q. Stranahan
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