PA12: a unique corner of America

If you read this site last Tuesday, you know Dennis Roddy doesn't buy into the PA-12 special as being a national political bellwether. Here's his lede on his wrapup of the race yesterday:

Once again, a remote district in Appalachia's steel-and-coal belt declined to behave as predicted, opting to be less a mirror of national mood than a window into a unique corner of America.

He also has this nice tidbit from the GOP side:

As last week wore down, officials at the House Republican Campaign Committee sent pollster Gene Ulm back into the field in the 12th District to sort through results that upended his earlier polls that put the race at a dead heat.

What Mr. Ulm did was to re-interview 50 Democratic voters in Greene County who had earlier said they were leaning toward the Republican, Mr. Burns. Those early poll numbers gave credence to the idea that the 12th was a bellwether of national voter ire with the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress that had pushed through two programs especially disliked among the senior-heavy district in the midst of coal country: health care reform and carbon emission cap-and-trade.

What Mr. Ulm found was that 75 percent of those Greene County Democrats who were leaning toward Burns did in fact vote for the Republican.

The deduction was that the middle-right Democrats of the district stayed with Mr. Burns, but that harder-line Democrats, more likely to lean center-left, turned out and drove up the numbers because they wanted to vote out Mr. Specter in the Senate primary.