Joe Sestak's maverick Senate bid is family-run

Democratic ex-admiral relies on self, family in U.S. Senate campaign

WASHINGTON -- His core advisers are his siblings, he spends each night poring over reams of campaign data and he has no intention of shoveling out "walking around money" on Election Day.

Joe Sestak is running an atypical Pennsylvania campaign, and he's betting that in this topsy-turvy political year the approach will make him the state's next U.S. senator -- because it hasn't failed him yet.

In May, the hyperkinetic operation knocked off a 30-year Senate institution named Arlen Specter and stuck a finger in the eye of the state and national Democratic establishment backing the party-switching incumbent.

And while the establishment rushed to embrace the man it tried to toss from the race, the Sestak campaign hasn't entirely hugged back. Its officials participate in the strategy meetings of the coordinated statewide Democratic campaign, and they collaborate in areas where labor unions and Democratic forces have proved effective -- "centers of excellence," Mr. Sestak calls them.

But when the coordinated campaign asked him to fork over a significant pile of campaign cash over the summer, Mr. Sestak balked. He looked around at his own operation -- 25 field offices, 26,000 phone calls per day, 15,000 volunteers ready to mobilize on Nov. 2 -- and found it to be more formidable than the one that had battled him in the primary and failed.

"I do try to work with the coordinated campaign," Mr. Sestak said last week in the gathering dusk outside the U.S. Capitol.

"But at the end of the day, I feel it's incumbent upon me that they need a U.S. senator that works for the people of Pennsylvania, and the success of that is my responsibility, because not to succeed means people get hurt. So at the end of the day, I make decisions on what will win."

The Sestak camp and the Democratic apparatus publicly claim that they're getting along well, as their coordinated attacks on Republican Pat Toomey as a handmaiden of Wall Street -- where he used to work as a derivatives trader -- have sharpened. And Mr. Sestak is helping out the coordinated campaign by asking donors who already have given the federal maximum amount to his campaign to give to the state Democratic committee.

Some Democratic insiders, though, are grumbling privately about the Sestak campaign's approach.

"He does not follow conventional approaches to campaigns, and that makes the career Democratic Party establishment types uncomfortable," said Mark Nevins, a Philadelphia-based Democratic consultant.

"But it's impossible to argue with the results. Because all he does is win. So I don't think anyone should assume that just because Joe Sestak doesn't run conventional campaigns that somehow he's doing it wrong."

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10269/1090492-178.stm#ixzz10bmIAx7t

same pattern Sestak set in his run against Specter. In the primary, Sestak won every county in PA but 3!

I'd love to see that happen again in November.

Sestak scares the machine pols - that's one of the reasons I keep voting for him and supporting his campaign.

mark