No clear message out of Tuesday primaries

No clear message out of Tuesday primaries
Holly Bailey is a senior political writer for Yahoo! News


As strategists chew over the results of Tuesday's primaries and special elections, remember that old adage: All politics is local.

Sure, plenty of themes and storylines emerged Tuesday — among them the anti-incumbent, anti-establishment wave that has Congress members scared to death about November re-election prospects.

But that's not the only way to interpret Tuesday's results. For one thing, the overall vote didn't seem to play out as a referendum on President Obama, as Republicans had hoped. More than anything, this primary season's "Super Tuesday" came down to how voters felt about their own slate of candidates and local concerns.

In Pennsylvania, Democratic voters in the Senate primary rejected incumbent Arlen Specter, a 30-year veteran of the chamber, in favor of Rep. Joe Sestak, who bucked the White House and state Democratic establishment to seek his party's nomination. Yes, it was an insider-vs.-outsider race, and yes, the White House should be a little concerned that Obama's high-profile endorsement of Specter didn't help. But those factors seem to have been eclipsed by Specter's own problems with Democratic voters in the state. They couldn't get past Specter's Republican-until-last-year profile — a detail that Sestak hammered home in the final days of the campaign with an ad reminding voters of Specter's ties to GOP figures like George W. Bush, Rick Santorum and Sarah Palin.

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