Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania is leaving the GOP for the Democrats (NPR, BBC). Assuming that Al Franken is declared the winner in Minnesota, the Democrats will have a filibuster-proof sixty votes.

This is going to shift the spotlight very much to Minnesota in the short and medium term. The (sort-of) incumbent, Norm Coleman, is pretty much holed below the waterline; he is currently 312 votes behind Al Franken but is fighting quite doggedly in the courts for recounts. It is a losing endeavour – the last set of ballots he managed to have recounted actually increased Franken’s lead – but dragging the contest out will lengthen the period in which the GOP can filibuster. That may damage the GOP’s chances of winning again in Minnesota (although I don’t think anyone is going to come out of this smelling of roses) but the RNC may well feel that Minnesota is worth sacrificing to stop the Dems reaching 60 votes – particularly as the RNC is a bit rabid at the moment and, by US standards, Franken is a rabid liberal.

Talking of rabidity, part of the reason for Specter’s leaving the GOP is that he has always been one of the most moderate Republicans – he ran for his party’s nomination for the ’96 presidential election on the basis that Clinton was not going to be removed by a religious conservative. As his former party has moved to the right, particularly following the 2008 elections that removed other moderate Republicans in the Congress, he became increasingly isolated amongst Senate GOPers. He and Senators Snowe and Collins, both of Maine, were the only Republican Senators to vote for the economic stimulus bill.

This was coupled with problems for Specter in the Pennsylvania GOP. Increasingly, moderate Republican office-holders have found themselves facing serious primary challenges from well-funded candidates with stronger conservative credentials. In this case, it would have been Pat Toomey; Specter narrowly beat off Toomey’s 2004 challenge and, I presume, thought he didn’t have much chance of beating him this time round. Toomey declared on April 15, so it may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Toomey was the President of one of the leading groups that opposes moderate GOPers, the Club for Growth, of which more here.

I covered the magic number sixty here and here.

As an aside, I heard Larry J. Sabato (whose book, A More Perfect Constitution, I thoroughly recommend) describe the Minnesota race as ‘the two worst candidates in any election in 2008′, hence the high vote, even by Minnesotan standards, for a third party candidate, in this case Dean Barkley (Independence) with 15%.

xD.

Posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Categories: Americana.
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