As Senate race tightens, Toomey and Sestak debate in Pittsburgh

The two candidates for Pennsylvania's open U.S. Senate seat stuck to the safe ground of their familiar campaign messages as they debated in a Pittsburgh television studio Friday, a caution perhaps reflecting the new reality that their race has become a dead heat.

Republican Pat Toomey said that Democrat Joe Sestak's votes as a suburban Philadelphia congressman showed him to be an extreme liberal "to the left" of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Sestak, meanwhile, argued that Toomey was "on the fringe" of the most conservative wing of the GOP.

It was the second and final debate of the campaign, broadcast live on WPXI-TV in Pittsburgh and statewide on the Pennsylvania Cable Network, one of the final chances for Toomey and Sestak to reach undecided voters.

For an hour, the two men traded jabs on economic issues, sometimes interrupting each other as the moderator, WPXI-TV news anchor David Johnson, tried to keep order and scolded them for not answering a question.

"We can't borrow and spend our way to prosperity, otherwise Greece would have the best economy in the world," said Toomey, founder of a small chain of family restaurants and a former Wall Street trader. He said Sestak did not understand how to create jobs, criticizing his rival's votes for the financial-industry bailout and rescues of GM and Chrysler, as well as the stimulus.

Sestak, a retired Navy rear admiral, said he had to clean up the mess left behind by the irresponsible spending and tax-cutting under President George W. Bush. "We'd been torpedoed and had to caulk the holes," he said.

The two actually agreed that the tone of their race had grown negative, but neither accepted blame for it, defending their ads as issue-based and accurate.

In response to a question, both said that their chief flaw was over-ambition and that their wives were their best asset

"I try to do too much," Sestak said.

"Sometimes I try to keep a lot of balls up in the air, and I can get distracted," Toomey said.

A pile of new polling data in the last few days indicated the race is closing after Toomey had seemed to be on a glide path for months.

Quinnipiac University's latest poll, released Thursday, showed Toomey getting 48 percent of likely voters to 46 percent for Sestak, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The 1,046 respondents were surveyed Oct. 13-17. In the university's Sept. 22 poll, Toomey held a 50 percent to 43 percent advantage.

A survey released Tuesday by Public Policy Polling found Sestak in the lead for the first time, 46 percent to 45 percent. That poll, of 718 likely voters, was conducted Sunday and Monday and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

The two have been trading leads within the margin of error in nightly tracking polls by Muhlenberg College.

"What you can say with a pretty good degree of confidence is it's moved off its flatline course that it's been on forever," said Christopher Borick, the Muhlenberg College pollster.

A senior Democratic strategist working on Senate, congressional and gubernatorial campaigns said that polls over the summer reflected that Republican voters were more committed to voting, but that recently Democratic voters have tuned in to the party's message that they should fear the return to power of a GOP in thrall to its extreme right wing.

"People aren't any less anxious about their jobs," the strategist said.

Sestak's ads have targeted Toomey, a former Lehigh Valley congressman, as far to the right. One uses Toomey's own words saying his record is "indistinguishable" from staunchly conservative former Sen. Rick Santorum's. Ads from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee rip Toomey for his support of free trade and votes for policies it says shipped American jobs to China.

"It's a series of marginal things that may have moved some soft Democrats, people who were on the fence who either were not voting or were considering Toomey to tighten back up with their ranks," Borick said. Still, he said, the GOP has an advantage in the "fear wars" because its base is reacting to what it sees in Washington.

Toomey campaign advisers say they never expected a cakewalk, that Pennsylvania is the kind of state that features close political races. At any rate, one said, the perception of momentum for Sestak had served as a wake-up call for conservatives and enabled the campaign to raise "a ton" of money in the last several days.

The free-market advocacy group Club for Growth, which Toomey once led, bought $1 million worth of advertising time in the Philadelphia media market Thursday for a new ad attacking Sestak as "just another liberal" dancing to the tune of Obama and the Democratic leadership.

"Yes, Joe Sestak served honorably in the Navy," the new 30-second spot says. "His service in Congress is the problem."