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Well, there’s no point putting this off. Let’s take a first quick — and somewhat fatigued — look at what went wrong in tonight’s Senate race, where Joe Sestak lost to Pat Toomey.
It’s pretty clear that the Democrats overhyped earlier claims of massive turnout. Just to take one example, earlier today I passed along claims that there was a surge in voting among college students at the University of Pittsburgh. It is true that additional voting machines were ordered late in the day for the Pitt campus. But in the final analysis, turnout at Posvar Hall — which handles students in Litchfield Towers — was slightly below totals in 2006.
Four years ago, when Bob Casey beat Rick Santorum, nearly 750 votes were cast in Ward 4, District 8. Yesterday, only 726 votes were cast. This election’s numbers are unofficial, of course, but the point remains: Turnout among young voters, who Democrats hoped would follow up on their support for Obama, was flat.
And students didn’t just fail to make an impact in Oakland. A week ago, the irreplaceable Chris Briem noted a spike in new voter registration in Centre County, which includes State College. That too lead some to hope there might be a spike in voter participation among students.
If so, it didn’t help Democratic Senate candidate Joe Sestak. In unofficial results, Sestak got 21,602 votes from Centre County. In 2006, meanwhile, Casey got nearly 24,600.
That was the pattern for Sestak all across the state. I can’t find one county where he improved on Casey’s performance. Which seems like such an obvious factor that I wouldn’t even mention it … except for the fact that I spent most of my evening at the Sestak gathering over on the North Side. And as the evening wore on, there was some grumbling about Philadelphia letting us down. After all, the conventional wisdom was that this election was goign to be “all about Philadelphia.”
But actually, Philly is one of the few counties where the Democrats’ Senate candidate didn’t lose much ground between 2006 and 2010. Sestak earned 84 percent of the vote there — the same portion that Casey got four years ago. True, he netted 7,000 fewer votes in Philly. But compare that to Allegheny County, where Sestak came up nearly 70,000 votes short of Casey’s 2006 total. Had Sestak just repeated Casey’s 2006 performance in Allegheny County, that would almost have been enough to tie the entire election up.
So while it’s tempting to blame Philadelphia for all our problems — starting with Ed Rendell — it was Democratic shortcomings everywhere else that really hurt Sestak. In the weeks leading up to the election, Democrats told me that some of my more cyncial blog posts underestimated Democratic “get out the vote” efforts. And they tried to tout those efforts right up through this evening. But at this point, I see little evidence that they had anything to boast about.
(ADDED: Minutes after posting this, it occurred to me it was unfair. Considering everything the Democrats were up against this year, and considering the much larger margin of defeat in the governor’s race, it was a hell of an accomplishment just keeping Sestak so close.)
Of course, it’s possible I’m missing something really obvious: I’m pretty fried. And I don’t mean to slight the efforts of all those folks who worked so hard to turn out voters. Earlier on Election Day, Toomey told Politico that he planned to make his victory speech at 10 p.m. — had it not been for Democratic field workers, he would have gotten that wish.
In any case, there are plenty of other people to blame for this year’s election debacle. Including me, I think. And come to that, more needs to be said about that Post-Gazette endorsement of Tom Corbett. But for now, we’d probably all be better off if I got some sleep.
This article appears in Oct 28 – Nov 3, 2010.
Toomey has literally been running for Senate for eight years, without stop; had a tremendous operation; and was working with a six-to-one financial advantage from outside groups.
He also never faced the serious media scrutiny that, say, Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle received.
I can fault Sestak for not doing more in Western Pennsylvania — what are we, chopped liver? — but he did pretty damn well in a terrible year for his party.
Moral victories, of course, are meaningless.
Anyway, I can already feel the economy surging! Whoo-hoo! Bring on the Brawndo! It’s got electrolytes!
“He also never faced the serious media scrutiny that, say, Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle received.”
>>> This is the part I feel bad about, of course. Though of course, Toomey was very shrewd about not ATTRACTING that kind of scrutiny. Much more so than the other Tea Party faves.
Toomey is only a conventional run-of-the-mill right-winger these days. He didn’t admit to practicing witchcraft, forward pornography to his supporters, or gaze blankly into the camera during televised debates.
He only wants to end corporate taxation, abolish the IRS and eliminate all civil rights protections for gays, so hell, he’s practically a moderate.
Do you consider yourself to be a journalist? If not, how would you describe your role?