Today, Pennsylvania voters are busy scrambling to the polls to cast their vote on who they want to represent Pennsylvania in the United States Senate.
I would have to say the race belongs to Casey. I just don't think Santorum can overcome his connection to Bush, which has led to much voter disdain since the campaign started. That is what this election has come down to, plain and simple. All Casey had to do during the campaign was show the voters that he was not Rick Santorum. Suprisingly, it worked, and he will be the one to take the Senate seat.
The Prediction
Casey wins with 52.3%
-T.W.Today I spoke with Matt Riffle, a sixth grade teacher at Spring Ridge Elementary School in the Wilson School District in Wyomissing, PA. Riffle taught third grade for nine years and this is his first year teaching sixth grade. He talked with me about how he is voting and how he thinks most other teachers vote.
Q: Which candidate do you think most other teachers support?
A: I would probably say most are going to back Casey, however, with my group of friends, most of us will be supporting Santorum. Most of my teacher freinds are Republican but that definitely doesn’t hold true for most teachers.
Q: Why are you supporting Santorum, as a teacher?
A: I don’t know that I’m basing my decision on my profession. To me it’s a More ...
Well America it's your big day - get out there and do you bit.
As for my predictions… I suspect that the Casey vs Santorum race may turn out to be closer than the polls indicate at the moment.
I think that of the 'likely voters' polled in the surveys, Santorum's strong voter base are more likely to actually vote than those who are voting for Casey's this year. It comes down to the fact that there are a lot of people who dislike Santorum and therefore are just voting for Casey by default, rather than strongly believing in his own political stance. Hence I am assuming that there will be many Pennsylvanians out there who are somewhat disillusioned with the lack choice for candidates.
Hence my tips for the election results are as such:
Casey to win More ...
For voters all over Pennsylvania, the time has come to make a decision in the 2006 United States Senate Election. On Tuesday, voters will flock to voting booths to make sure that their voices get heard and the candidate they believe best suited to serve in the Senate is elected.
There is, however, a slight problem I have with all of this. After following the campaign in this blog for eight weeks, I feel that neither Rick Santorum, nor Bob Casey deserves to win this election.
Santorum, for all of his experience, appears to be widely hated in Pennsylvania because of his closeness to President Bush and his hard-line conservative approach to policy. In my opinion, someone so widely despised should not be able to get any support from the voters, regardless of what he co More ...
Jes Lawson, who works in corporate finance in Villanova, PA, shares his views on the Senate election:
Q: What do you think the most important issue in this campaign/election?
I’m different than most people — economic and personal liberty. I consider that far more important than some transitory thing than a particular war or a particular view on a particular issue.
Q: Which candidate do you think best sides with you on this issue?
A: Santorum, but it’s hard to tell because Casey is basically running a campaign in which he doesn’t tell you about himself, he just tells you what’s bad about his opponent.
Q: What do you think is most important to Pennsylvanians?
A: My opinion is derived from More ...
I talked to Dr. David Rees, orthopaedic surgeon and president of the medical staff at the Reading Hospital and Medical Center in West Reading, Pennsylvania about what he thought was important to most Doctors in this election.
Q: What is the most important issue in this election for you as a doctor?
A: The simplest one is medical malpractice reform. Under Senator Santorum this will happen. Although he has lot of issues that I’m not too keen on he has established himself as wanting to reform medical malpractice. In my professional life that’s really the most important thing. We are in a state that has been declared one of six disaster states for malpractice. We’re looking at a situation where we can’t attract doctors. And selfishly, as an aging patient I'd More ...
In the minutes before the bell is due to sound, Santorum has thrown an interesting curve ball into the Casey camp by accusing him of supporting terror.
As per usual the advertisement in which he conveys this message is vague and provides little substance to back such claims. Thankfully several newspapers have provided at least a degree of context.
The issue at hand arose from a recent report into the ‘Terrorism Investments of the 50 States’ which was produced by the More ...
This post comes as a follow up to my previous interview on immigration which was with the ‘You Don’t Speak For Me Coalition.’ In order to get an alternative perspective I spoke to Mary Shaw who is the Philadelphia Area Coordinator for Amnesty International. Additionally Mary’s articles on politics, human rights, and social justice have appeared in numerous online forums, newspapers and magazines worldwide.
Here she tells us of Amnesty International’s stance towards issues of immigration.
Q. Will Amnesty International be putting their support behind either of the Senate candidates for the upcoming election?
A. No. Amnesty International (AI) is a non-pa More ...
After seeing a recent post on a classmate’s blog about the youth vote in the Montana Senate election, I decided to ask a few questions of my own about the youth vote in the Pennsylvania election. Yesterday, I had the chance to talk to Todd Taylor, chairman of the Pennsylvania State University College Republicans. I asked him a few questions about election issues and what the Penn State College Republicans were doing to get the vote out to other students.
As one would expect, Taylor said that he supported Santorum because he knew what Santorum wanted and planned to do in the Senate. On the other hand, he said Casey lacked a concrete plan and had spent too much time telling voters that he was not Santorum, instead of telling the voters where he stood on the issues.
< More ...Q: Does your organization endorse one of the candidates in this election?
We support Santorum, the incumbent. He has a 100 percent pro-life voting record, he has stood up for the unborn time and again, he helped write the partial birth abortion ban law, which was passed and he supports stem cell research but is against embryonic stem cell research.
Bob Casey says he’s pro-life but he would increase funding for family planning organizations, such as Planned Parenthood, which is the largest provider of abor More ...
As a follow-up to my last post, I recently had the chance to speak with Dr. Jack M. Treadway, a political science professor at Kutztown University, about Rick Santorum’s endorsement by the NRA. In my previous post, I raised a questions about whether or not the endorsement would make that much of a difference in the election. Treadway was busy, but he was able to answer a few questions by e-mail.
I first asked Treadway how much of a difference he thought the endorsement would make in the election. He said he didn’t believe that the endorsement would have much of an effect because Casey had already neutralized the issue with his stance on gun control.
“I don't think the endorsement will make much difference, although he (Santorum) got money from the NRA and Casey di More ...
A recent poll by Strategic Vision shows that Casey continues to lead Santorum as we near election day.
Forty-seven percent of those polled approved of Santorum’s job performance and 44 percent disapproved. But when asked who they would vote for if the election were held "today" (which was sometime between Oct. 20, 2006 and Oct. 23, 2006) 49 percent said Casey and 42 percent said Santorum.
Strategic Vision based this poll off of phone interviews with 1200 likely voters in Pennsylvania, ages 18 and older. The margin of error is plus/minus 3 percentage points.
Cary Funk, a senior project director at The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said it is important not to over int More ...
This past week, Rick Santorum traveled across the state, touting his recent endorsement by the National Rifle Association as candidate for the United States Senate. But, with both he and Casey taking a very similar, almost identical stance on gun issues, how much does this endorsement—and his eagerness to show it—help him?
In an article printed Wednesday in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Carrie Budoff wrote that Casey and Santorum “could be twins” on gun issues, adding that Santorum received an A-plus on his stances from the NRA, while Casey got an A.
Both Casey and Santorum oppose renewing the ban on the sale of semiautomatic weapons and support putti More ...
Rick Santorum recently wrote a brochure titled “50 Things You May Not Know About Rick Santorum.” Last week, he was asked by Newsweek reporter Matthew Philips, “What’s something I may not know about you?”
Santorum’s response was:
One of the things that I have been extremely active on, that very few people know about is my work to eradicate global AIDS. I worked to increase funding by over $800 million for this initiative because I think it is critically important that the U.S. play a role in eradicating this pandemic."
U2’s lead singer, Bono, spoke of how Santorum comes off in a certain way that sometimes takes the focus away from his more positive actions in an interview on Friday Oct. 20.
"I would suggest that Rick Santorum has More ...
Santorum and Casey have sought to create immigration as a substantial division point between their policy positions.
I spoke to Ira Mehlman, Media Director of the ‘You Don't Speak for Me! Coalition’ to find out more about immigration issues in Pennsylvania and the policy stances the candidates are taking.
The ‘You Don't Speak for Me! Coalition’ is a Latino/Hispanic movement created to challenge attitudes that assume all Hispanic people believe illegal immigrants should be treated with amnesty. Here is what she had to say in the lead up to Election Day…
Q. Will the You Don't Speak for Me! Coalition be putting their support behind either of the Senate candidates for the upcoming election?
A More ...
On Oct. 17, 2006, Rick Santorum compared the war in Iraq to J.R.R. Tolkien’s book turned movie, “The Lord of the Rings,” in an interview with the Bucks County Courier Times Editorial Board
Santorum said:“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else. It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”
In an article in the Bucks County Courier Times, Larry Smar, a spokesperson for Bob Casey, said, “You have to really question the judgment of a U More ...
Those who listened to “Breakfast with the Candidates” on KYW Newsradio may be feeling a little bit uncertain about just how Pennsylvania is doing economically.
Can we believe Santorum who sang the praises of his voting record which allowed for tax cuts in 2001 and 2003? He said the reductions benefited 4.6 million Pennsylvanians. He said it provided 6.6 million new jobs and hence provided ‘almost full employment’ (with unemployment standing at just 4.6%). He said the state deficit had dropped lower than the 40 year average (2% of GDP) and that gas costs and energy expenditure were on the down slide.
But then Casey replied with quite a different gathering of statistics. He reminded Santorum that under the Bush ad More ...
The debates in the 2006 Pennsylvania Senate Election have ended. The final two between Santorum and Casey were held on Monday in Philadelphia, and both candidates focused on a variety of topics including foreign policy and work ethic.
According to an Associated Press article printed on Tuesday, Casey accused the White House of moving too quickly to take military action. He also said that President Bush’s policies have made the United States worse off in regards to Iran and North Korea.
Casey criticized the Bush administration for not doing a good job of listening to military experts in regards to action in Iraq, and added later that he would rely on military intelligence to help him decide on whether or not he would take military action in North Korea or Iran. More ...
This may be old news to some, but I recently found out that from 1998-2006, Rick Santorum received more money from lobbyists than anyone in the Senate—$1,163,560, to be exact.
This information, contained in a report released by Public Citizen, raised a couple questions about the contributions to both the Casey and Santorum campaigns. Who is giving to whom? Who has received the most money so far?
According to opensecrets.org, Santorum has raised $21,103,542 for the 2006 election. Casey has raised $14,995,803.
I should note here that there is a disclaimer on opensecrets.org that states that the organizations listed as d More ...
Yesterday USA Today ran this story: Politicians' campaigns invade MySpace
So I set out to see whether Casey and Santorum had jumped on the bandwagon.
More ...I found an interesting, if a little dated, article in the Philadelphia Inquirer the other day.
An article printed Oct. 3 reported that 10 special interest groups in Pennsylvania had given more than $5 million—more than any other Senate contest in the nation—for television ads in the 2006 campaign. The money given favors Rick Santorum by a 4-1 ratio over Bob Casey.
The article also included lists of contributors to Softer Voices (a conservative issue advocacy group) and the Lantern Project (mainly funded by Casey contributors and labor unions), two of the biggest spenders on ads in More ...
‘Foleygate’ has captivated the media’s campaign coverage over the last week. After all there is nothing like a good sex scandal to spice up politics once in a while.
However, there is a new campaign issue making its way on to centre stage; this time however, the repercussions may be much more critical for America and the entire world. I am of course referring to the situation that has emerged in North Korea.
North Korea's reported nuclear test reverberated in Pennsylvania's U.S. Senate race yesterday as Democrat Bob Casey More ...
Bob Casey and Rick Santorum will go head to head tonight in the second key debate of the campaign.
The debate will be viewable online at www.kdka.com
However a preview of the race is currently avaialble on their site.
For those in Pittsburgh, remember to tune in at 7:00 pm on CBS, Channel 2.Or ... you can catch the KDKA debate on PCN:
Or...C-SPAN will air the KDKA debate on:
Rick Santorum has yet again fallen behind in the polls but he can still win it, said Terry Madonna, professor of public affairs and director of the Keystone Poll at Frankin & Marshall College.
“Do I think he can win? Yes,” Madonna said of Santorum. “Is it a tough road for him? Yes. I honestly think that Santorum can still win but he has a tough uphill fight.”
Although polls can be a good indicator, they are not always definite. “We’ve had lots of people that have been 15 to 20 points down in August and have gone on to win,” Madonna said.
Many candidates have won elections after being down in the polls, but Santorum's history is a little different. In the past, Santorum has been ahead in the polls and then wins by fewer points than predicted, Madonna said.More ...
Today the Amish community of Bart Township buries the last of the five girls to be killed in Monday's senseless shooting.
In the wake of the this innocent loss of life some serious questions should be asked.
Perhaps the first of these should pertain to gun violence within Pennsylvania. Surely when the Amish, a community who intentionally seek to distance themselves from many of the perils of modern society, come under such an attack, then it is time for PA to sit up and listen.
“Loss of any innocent life is devastating. Unjustified. Inexcusable. But the contrast in this particular shooting is striking because this was an Amish school and More ...
On Monday, I had the chance to talk to Michael A. Smerconish, host of the Michael Smerconish Morning Show on WPHT 1210 in Philadelphia. In addition to hosting his own show, Smerconish is also a fill-in for Bill O’Reilly on the “Radio Factor,” and for Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s “Scarborough County." He has also contributed to The Huffington Post.
My conversation with Smerconish was brief, but he had some very interesting things to say:
I first asked Smerconish about where he thought the election stood at this point, with Romanelli thrown off the ballot and Casey taking a double-digit lead in the polls.
He replied that the race was Casey’s to lose, adding that he felt Casey was running More ...
According to Terry Madonna, Professor of Public Affairs and Director of the Keystone Poll at Franklin & Marshall College, “All the commercials that both candidates are running have a degree of inaccuracy and exaggeration.”
The worst of all of the commercials is Santorum’s commercial called Corner House on Santorum’s website, Madonna said. The ad shows men sitting around a table in a smokey backroom and identifies them as Casey’s campaign team. It then singles them out and says the amount each contributed to Casey’s campaign and then points out that these men are “Casey’s largest contributors” who are under investigati More ...
A bit of roaming around Santorum's campaign website and you will find the link to "Where's Casey?"
A 'Where's Wally' style top, a bus going nowhere, ducks and quacking sounds, scary background music....
Santorum is cleverly crafting a paradigm of Casey connotations that even Casey wouldn't understand.
But then delve further and become a detective on Casey's case! ...if this doesn't amuse you for at least 10 minutes then I don't know what will!
I'm not sure just how effective such techniques will be - perhaps if children were given the vote and exposed to such quirky campaign strategies then Santorum would see a huge comeba More ...
And now, on to Part II of my interview with Next Direction:
Now that Romanelli has been removed from the ballot, how will it affect the election?
This is a huge deal. With Romanelli out, a big distraction is removed for the Casey campaign, allowing total focus on the incumbent.
If Romanelli is successful in his pending appeal, will he have enough time to make an impact when and if he re-enters the election?
Simply having Romanelli on the ballot as an option would be bad for Casey. Having Romanelli back in the race even at a late date and with no money might tighten the race to uncomfortable levels for Casey and would put a clear victory in doubt. The Democrats to the far left who call themselves progressives a More ...
I recently had the chance to interview Next Direction, a blogger from Pennsylvania. He manages a blog of the same name, previously mentioned in my best blogs entry. Next Direction had a lot to say, so we’ll be splitting the interview into two parts. Here’s Part I:
What should the candidates be focusing on the most in this election?
Santorum should be focusing on his record as a senator over the past 12 years, but he isn’t. He is spending almost all of his time attacking Casey.
Casey should be focusing on Iraq, the Bush record and Santorum’s ultra-conservative views. Casey needs to be holding the accountability mirror up to Santorum and Bush. I also believe a vast majority of people in Pennsy More ...
I recently had the chance to interview Tom Ferrick, a metro columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, author of Ferrick’s Poliblog 2006 and host of the Pennsy Political Podcast, and ask him a few questions about the Senate race. Below, you will find some of the questions that I asked, along with summaries of his answers.
What issues will the candidates be focusing on in this election?
Ferrick said it seemed as if Santorum and Casey would be focusing a lot on each other, with Casey focusing on Santorum’s performance while in office and his ties to th More ...
Does going to a synagogue on Saturday or church on Sunday, make a difference when it comes down to politics?
Will a bar mitzvah rather than a baptism make the candidate a better politician?
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, released a report in July this year that detailed religion and faith based ethics as having an important role in the way the public understand their political representatives.
So, should the personal religious convictions of Senate candidates be judged by the greater public or should we simply look at their policies and disregard how they came to these conclusions? Perhaps, some would argue, it is impossible to split hairs over such intrinsically connected notions.
More ...This ruling could represent a big victory for Democrats and the Casey campaign, as it is believed that Romanelli, if allowed to be on the ballot, would draw anti-Santorum votes away from Casey.
Romanelli's attorney said yesterday that he would appeal the Commonwealth Court's ruling. Romanelli also has another appeal in the State Supreme Court challenging the 67,070 petition signature threshold.In other news, a Quinnipiac University poll released today showed Bob Casey leading Rick Santorum 51-39 percent among likely voters. Four pe More ...
In a brief Associated Press article posted in the Pittsburg Post Gazette, Commonwealth Court Judge James R. Kelley ordered that Romanelli be removed from the ballot because his nominating petitions were 8,931 signatures shy of the 67,070 he needed to qualify for the ballot.
There should be more details in the news media tomorrow about these developments.-T.W.
This year, candidates across America are ensuring their campaign ads are readily available through new information mediums. At the forefront of this new wave is YouTube – a website where its visitors watch and share an average of about 70 million videos every day.
However, after having searched through the YouTube archives it seems Bob Casey is dominating this information tube at the moment. Primarily these videos are coming directly from the Bob Casey camp who have posted 39 videos under the name of ‘BobCaseyForSenate’ an alias linked back to Bob Casey’s official webpage, 19 other pro-Casey videos have also been posted under ‘Santorum Exposed” which links back to the website of the same name. On More ...
A Big Fat Slob is written by a man who apparently has nothing to do other than report on Pennsylvania politics from his oversized recliner. Just kidding. Big Fat Slob has a wide array of articles about Pennsylvania and Washington politics. One thing I really like about his blog is his side bars. Not only does he have a section for “Breaking News,” similar to a real news site, but he also has link lists for: Polls, PA Political blogs, Blogs on senate race, National Politics, World Headlines and more. Not only does this keep the reader scrolling down and consequently leading them to more of Big Fat Slob’s entries but it also shows a lot of professionalism. He must have taken a More ...
Bloggers have but a moment to catch their reader’s attention with an eye-pleasing format, a captivating headline, or something that makes their site that little bit unique.
It is a special kind of person who trawls through political blogs, what makes him different from the apathetic average Joe and moreover what does he want from us?
To find this out I take a look at five of our hottest competing blogsites that are covering the Pennsylvania Senate Race.
More ...As is the case with any election, many bloggers both in and out of the state of Pennsylvania have offered their two cents on the race between Rick Santorum and Bob Casey. I have decided to make a list here of what I feel are the five best that comment on this race.
Being from outside of Pennsylvania, I first began looking for blogs that could fill me in on Pennsylvania’s political climate and provide pertinent information that would give me great insight into how both Santorum and Casey would operate during their respective campaigns.
Also, being a Pennsylvania outsider, I looked for blogs written by the “regular people,” voters from Pennsylvania who had been watching the campaign for themselves and felt strongly about whom they were going to elect to represent thei More ...
Important developments in Romanelli's case found at Keystone Politics:
According to an article printed last week in the Philadelphia Inquirer. a lawyer for Pennsylvania Democrats revealed in Commonwealth Court that Carl Romanelli had more than 29,000 invalid signatures on his nominating petitions. Judge James R. Kelley did not hand down a decision, but he did set a Sept. 25 hearing for Romanelli's lawyer to give evidence as to why the invalid signatures should be accepted.
But according to an article in the Post-Gazette, Carl Romanelli has been granted an emergenc More ...
Dr. Jack M. Treadway is the Chair of the Department of Political Science at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Public Policy Making in the American States, Elections in Pennsylvania and various articles on state government.
More ...Bob Geiger is the award-winning author of the Yellow Dog Blog and BobGeiger.com. He specializes in the coverage of the U.S. Senate, and is also a contributing writer to Alternet, Democrats.com, Democratic Underground and The Huffington Post. Geiger has actually predicted in his blog that Bob Casey Jr. would win the election, so I posed a few questions to him in order to get his perspective.
More ...
Although I am currently a journalism and politics student at the University of Richmond in Virginia, I am only here for a few months as part of a study abroad program. I actually live just outside Perth, in Western Australia, and am half way through my degree at Curtin University.
Hence, what I hope to bring to this Senatorial Race Blogsite is a somewhat unusual and perhaps outside perspective of analysis that will in turn broaden the understanding of the voting public.
Due to my geographical distance from American politics and social issues I am approaching this topic with a desire to learn more about a political system that ultimately effects the entire world. I sincerely hope this is reflected through our blogsite and that it encourages voters to engage in these iss More ...
Rick Santorum Graduated from Penn State University in 1980 with a degree in Political Science. So therefore I posed the same questions to political scientist James Eisenstein of Penn State University to find out his thoughts on the campaign so far…
More ...It is not difficult to feel somewhat overwhelmed by senatorial campaigns and get lost somewhere amid the surges of posed photos and plentiful promises.
Therefore we sought the opinions of those in the know: political scientists and people monitoring the race so far.
Our questioning begins with Assistant Professor Matthew Green of The Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. Why start here you ask? Well Bob Casey graduated from his law degree here in 1988 so it seemed like a reasonable place to start our quest...
Q. What makes this the key Senate race to watch?
A. There are several reasons. First, it is one of the se More ...
http://nextdirection.blogspot.com -This guy will have a lot to say about the election. His tagline for his blog is: “politics and policy with an eye for the f More ...
Contrasting polls have shown that Democratic challenger Bob Casey is leading incumbent Rick Santorum (R) in the race for the Senate seat. (An Aug. 28 USA Today/Gallup poll shows Casey leading 56 percent to 38 percent, but an Aug. 24 Keystone poll shows Casey leading only 44 percent to 39 percent.)
The Democrats need to take five seats away from the Republicans in order to restore balance in the Senate.
One important issue and factor in this election will be how Santorum handles criticism from his opponents and the voters. Santorum is an outspoken c More ...So far Casey has exploited Santorum’s vulnerability by portraying him as a George Bush Mini-Me in their first television debate on September 3, 2006. "When you have two politicians in Washington that agree 98 percent of the time, one of them is really not necessary," Casey said.
The debate focused heavily on the conflict in Iraq which allowed Casey to gain an edge over his Republican opponent who stood in support of an administr More ...
Trey Wydysh, Brady Leifer, and Sian White, students covering the 2006 Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race