It’s not just about ‘primary voters’, though. Major party primaries are decided by major party activists. If the state party completely repudiates an incumbent and stirs up the party base (which is usually much more conservative or liberal than the majority of general election voters) in favor of his opponent, then the primary voters will turn out for the challenger. In this case, the ‘polls’ are very much linked to the ‘pols’. It is not possible to beat an incumbent in a primary unless this sort of political repudiation takes place at the state party level. Most primary voters tend to vote the way the state party machine tells them, the only time a primary really means anything is when there is a genuinely open primary in which none of the candidates enjoys monolithic support from the party organization.

These state party shifts are very likely to accomplish nothing when the incumbent is entrenched and popular. In the case of the earlier Connecticut example, the state party repudiated Joe Lieberman and his challenger won the primary… and Lieberman won re-election over his liberal primary opponent and the more conservative Republican candidate by a significant margin in the general.

In primaries, pols have lot to do with the polls.

“It’s interesting to me that Specter chose to highlight his support for large Federal deficit spending rather than the GOP social conservative tilt as his reason to make the change.”

Pennsylvania is reasonably socially conservative in the rural areas and some of the suburban districts. Specter’s success is built on the fact that the urban districts are too socially liberal for a conservative Republican and the rural districts are too economically populist for a corporate conservative candidate. He doesn’t need to accent the social conservative issue because one doesn’t win a state wide PA election with JUST Philly and the Pitt, and some degree of social conservatism is expected in the boondocks. Yet everyone, urban liberals and rural populists, want federal money. The fiscal issues are very important, and they trend in a way that favors Specter over an economic Social Darwinist like Toomey.

It’s interesting to me that Specter chose to highlight his support for large Federal deficit spending rather than the GOP social conservative tilt as his reason to make the change.

Toomey can’t win a general election in PA. He’s great for the GOP base, but one doesn’t win a general election in PA by rallying the GOP base. One doesn’t win a Senate seat in PA by running a guy from the Club for Growth. Toomey is too socially conservative to play well in Philly and the Pitt, and not populist enough to play well enough in the rural districts to outvote the urban and suburban districts.

Worst of all, for the GOP, Specter has always had a lot of moderate and independent support that just will not be there for Toomey.

I am kind of surprised they really went nuclear.

The best thing the PA Republicans could do is run someone young who keeps asking Specter if he would like to sit down and be comfortable in debates.    I think if I was almost 80 with recurrent cancer I would contemplate some nice vacations.

There had been gossip about Specter going Democrat on HuffPo a month or so ago, but I had thought it was unsubstantiated musings by hopeful bloggers wanting to see a change in the Senate makeup.

As for how Specter will vote… that has always been a bit of a mystery. In the Reagan era, he was consistently more liberal than now. In the first Bush administration, however, he was one of the leading Senatorial defenders of Clarence Thomas and really worked Anita Hill over in the confirmation hearings. In the Clinton administration he voted with the Republicans fairly consistently, in the second Bush administration he started drifting back to the left.

I think there will be an inevitable left-ward drift, if a small one, in his votes as a Democrat. Caucusing with the Democrats instead of the Republicans, he is going to feel the same kind of pressure to make things happen that he felt to obstruct when he was caucusing with the Republicans. I tend to the think the liberal voting record of the Reagan era is the ‘real’ Specter and he is getting back to ‘himself’ after being caught up in the wave of Republican enthusiasm of the Gingrich-W. Bush era in the party.

Yes, the neo-con, big government, intrusive government version of GOP is dead and gone (at least in large degree) and — good riddance.  I never want to see that again.