Poll: Santorum & Casey close; Ed strong
Expert: '06 Senate race will be a 'barnburner'
From a distance at least, Pennsylvania's 2006 U.S. Senate race looks like a rumble.
Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., and his declared rival, Democratic State Treasurer Bob Casey are in a dead heat
according to the latest Daily News/CN8 Keystone poll conducted at Franklin & Marshall College.
The survey of 531 adults found 44 percent favoring Casey, 43 percent for Santorum, with 13 percent undecided.
"This is going to be a barnburner," said poll director Terry Madonna. "Some regard this as the single most
important Senate race in the country, and it's dead even before we start"...
Madonna said the Santorum-Casey dogfight is the result of the Democrats finding a well-known candidate and
Santorum hitting a recent patch of public disapproval.
"There was that issue of taxpayers paying for Santorum's kids to go to a cyber school, and the gay marriage
issue," Madonna said, "plus the fact that Santorum has an in-your-face attitude and has been going around the state stumping
for Bush's social security plan, which isn't flying."
In November 2003, Santorum drew a 46 percent favorable rating. In this survey, it was only 39 percent.
Casey might have a wider margin in the race if more people knew him. Despite the fact that the Casey name
- between his two-term governor father and himself - has been on a statewide ballot for 40 years, 36 percent of those polled
said they hadn't heard enough about Casey to make a judgment. Only 17 percent hadn't heard about Santorum...
Madonna said none of the head-to-head comparisons mean much at this point.
"The public has no real sense of who these people are yet," he said.
Pennsylvanians are watching the Social Security debate, and they give President Bush a thumping, with 56
percent disapproving of his handling of the issue, 31 percent approving.
On the other hand, those surveyed favor by a 50 to 40 margin Bush's proposal to divert some payroll taxes
to private accounts .
There was a strong populist current in other questions on Social Security. Nearly two-thirds favor requiring
higher income workers to pay Social Security taxes on all their earnings, which is roughly the same number opposed to cutting
current benefits or increasing the retirement age.
"There is some logic to this," Madonna said. "They're saying ‘We think Social Security has some problems,
and we're open to private accounts, but we don't want to scrap the current system.' "
Finally, Pennsylvanians seem to like legalized gambling. Sixty-one percent favor the law legalizing slot
machines, while only 34 percent oppose it.
And that was in a poll sample in which 37 percent described themselves as born again Christians or fundamentalists.
