Can Joe Sestak Buck the Odds Against Arlen Specter?

[Purveyor]

On paper, perhaps, Representative Joe Sestak seems to be on a quixotic mission — to unseat Arlen Specter, a 30-year incumbent Senator who is probably the most successful politician in Pennsylvania history. And he's got to do it all in nine months with less money than Specter, little name recognition outside his district in the Philadelphia suburbs and the near unanimous disapproval of the state's powerful Democratic establishment.

Is he crazy?

Surprisingly, many of the state's veteran political observers and activists say no. "It's going to require an insurgency campaign, kind of a storming the gates with pitchforks and torches kind of campaign," says strategist Mark Nevins, who advised Hillary Clinton in her successful primary campaign in Pennsylvania last year. "That is difficult to run but can be very effective in this kind of environment."

Most important, the campaign must be keyed to Specter's unexpected defection from the Republican Party last spring. On April 28, he announced he was switching parties after admitting he would lose the GOP primary to conservative challenger Pat Toomey. Specter's blunt and clinical explanation for why he switched did little to endear him to many of the Democratic partisans who will vote in the May 18 primary election. "He lost his first and best opportunity to really make people believe that it was a fundamental shift in his ideology," Nevins says. "Instead he made it sound opportunistic."

Party leaders, however, have rallied around Specter, starting with President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and Governor Ed Rendell and going down to city and local elected officials throughout the state. They have made quite clear that they do not welcome a major challenge against the newly minted Democrat. Sestak, who had been touted as a Democratic challenger to Specter before his party switch, never did embrace Specter as a Democrat, immediately raising questions publicly about his commitment to Democratic values. The congressman jumped into the primary race earlier this month after touring all of the state's counties, spreading his name and testing the political temperature. Muhlenberg College political scientist Chris Borick says Sestak may be tapping into the grass-roots mood. Specter "is a Democrat by necessity," Borick says, "not a Democrat by choice. Joe Sestak is by choice. I think that's powerful in a primary."

Still, early polls aren't encouraging. Quinnipiac University reported in July that Specter would beat Sestak easily in the primary, 55% to 23%. According even to Sestak's campaign, at least 70% of primary voters don't know enough about him to even form an opinion. But the Quinnipiac poll and others also found troubling signs for Specter — his job-approval numbers statewide, for example, have fallen to their lowest point in the poll's history: 47% approve while 46% disapprove.

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TIME: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1915595,00.html