It’s a style that differs radically from the ads currently running in a majority of Senate races, as well as many of the ones aired by outside groups in the state as well. As I wrote this week, one of the unintended consequences of the surge in outside spending is that candidates can pledge to run clean campaigns while relying on other interests to do their dirty work for them. But it’s also a style that Pat Toomey excels at, seizing the high ground in his elections at crucial moments in a way that distracts from some of his policy positions that may be too conservative for his constituents.

Sestak won his Democratic primary in part on the back of a devastating ad that depicted Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) as a cynic who switched parties to maintain his grasp on power. But when your opponent is lobbing softballs like this one, it’s at lot harder to paint him as a monster:

Sestak’s ad links Toomey to former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who got voted out of office for his conservative views in 2006, and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, whom Toomey once called “a spectacular governor.”

“My voting record is pretty hard to distinguish from Rick Santorum’s,” the ad features Toomey bragging, as well as another clip in which he says that he ”would support legislation in Pennsylvania that would ban abortion.”

Meanwhile, the Club for Growth, the conservative anti-tax organization that Toomey used to head, is doing the heavy hitting for him. It’s up with an ad that says Sestak is “laughably liberal.”

“Despite the recession, Sestak voted for that $700 billion Obama-Pelosi stimulus,” the ad says, before going through the classic conservative laundry list of individual scientific projects that apparently sound ridiculous because they involve studying animals. ”Sestak backed spending a half-million dollars to study ant hills, 210,000 tax dollars to examine how honeybees learn, even $100,000 for socially conscious puppet shows.”

As my article notes, Toomey seems to be winning this battle for the middle so far, but it’s too soon to count Sestak out. He’s a tireless campaigner who shocked a lot of people by surging from 14 points down in the polls in his primary race against Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) earlier this year. This time, by comparison, he’s only trailing by about 7.

Republican Senate candidate Pat Toomey campaigns in Centre County, Pa. (Toomey for U.S. Senate)

As in many close elections, Pennsylvania’s Senate race has largely become a contest about defining and capturing the elusive middle. Democrats might enjoy a substantial registration advantage in the state, courtesy of the 2008 elections, but the state’s swing voters — mostly middle-class suburbanites with tolerant social views and moderate fiscal concerns — are recognized by both Rep. Joe Sestak (D) and former Rep. Pat Toomey (R) as the real prize.

[GOP1] These nonaligned folks are seeking a candidate who will look out for working families and approximate their own pragmatic views. And with less than a month to go before Nov. 2, it looks like they’ve settled, against all odds, on Toomey.

Judging purely by his policy positions, Toomey would appear to be well to the right of the average Pennsylvania voter, and more in line with some of the very conservative Tea Party-backed candidates who have fascinated the national media in recent months. Like Sharron Angle of Nevada, he hopes to ban abortion and privatize parts of social security. Like Rand Paul of Kentucky, he has argued for the repeal of the president’s health care and Wall Street reform bills. While in Congress, he complained that the Bush tax cuts were too small. His roll call votes place him much further to the right than former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (R), whom many thought too conservative for statewide office, and even former Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, the illegal immigration demagogue who is running for his state’s governorship as a member of the American Constitution Party.

But Toomey is hardly ever mentioned in the same breath as Angle or Paul, let alone Tancredo. And while these candidates’ occasionally extreme rhetoric has no doubt done its part to make Toomey’s own views appear more reasonable, refraining from sounding off is hardly sufficient to explain his moderate appeal. Toomey’s success in wooing Pennsylvania’s independent vote is attributable instead to an incredible, Cincinnatus-like story of modesty and civic virtue that he has crafted over the years and stuck to with remarkable discipline, even when confronted by its inconsistencies. He balances his far-right views with a personality that’s reasonable, upright, and, at times, downright boring.

And it’s working. With the Senate election fast approaching, recent poll averages show Toomey ahead of Sestak by a solid seven points. The conservative Toomey isn’t new to winning the votes of most middle-of-the-road Pennsylvanians, however. It’s a strategy that can be traced to the earliest days of his political career following his move to Allentown, Pa.

Leaving Wall Street Behind

Toomey’s campaign website isn’t shy about advertising the candidate’s humble origins. “Growing up the third of six children in a blue-collar, working class family — his father a union worker and his mother a part-time secretary at the family’s parish church — Pat was taught the values of hard work and self-reliance,” his official bio notes.

Toomey, who declined to be interviewed for this story, traded derivatives on Wall Street for six years after college, followed by a year performing research in Hong Kong on capital market formation for a pair of billionaire investors. But his preferred political narrative begins in Allentown, where he moved after returning from Hong Kong in 1991 and set up shop with his brothers, founding “a successful, family-owned restaurant business with several Pennsylvania locations,” his bio says. “In 1997, after nearly 10 years as a small business owner, Pat grew weary of the huge tax burdens imposed on Pennsylvania’s small businesses. So he acted.”

But Toomey had always been interested in politics — he’d majored in political philosophy at Harvard and grown more conservative in the process — and the Republican wave in the 1994 congressional elections inspired him to get involved. “1994 was a watershed year,” he told Derivatives Strategy magazine after he was elected to Congress in 1998. “As a conservative, I felt that this was the first opportunity in my lifetime to participate in the process within the context of a majority and actually make something happen.”

Inspired by the anti-tax movement that helped sweep Republicans into office in 1994, Toomey leapt at the chance to serve on a government study commission — tasked with writing a brand-new charter for the city of Allentown — that occurred the same year. It was an opportunity to limit the size of government on a local level, and he succeeded in doing so by backing a new requirement for a two-thirds majority vote before the city could attempt to raise taxes in the future.

The lens through which he conveyed his views, even then, however, wasn’t the lens of Friedrich Hayek (or even Grover Norquist), but of small business.

“I knew him as a businessman,” recalls Wayne Stephens, Allentown’s former police chief, who served on the commission with him. “He was extremely business minded, and interested not just in public service, but in what was happening in everything.”

Toomey learned to thrive on the commission by presenting his conservative beliefs as the concerns of a small businessman, and he framed his goals of rolling back taxes as relief for the little guy.

“Our goal was to protect the taxpayer, not so much to serve the elected officials,” recalls David Bausch, the commission’s chairperson and an ally of Toomey’s at the time. Toomey would later spend $2,500 to help secure the charter’s passage in 1996.

Dressing the Part

It was during Toomey’s run for Congress in 1998, and even more so during his closely contested but successful fights to defend his seat in 2000 and 2002, that Toomey learned to hone his discipline and perfect his political pitch.

In many ways, Pennsylvania’s 15th Congressional District had come to mirror the state as a whole. The cities of Allentown and Bethlehem bestowed the district with a slight Democratic edge, but a growing white-collar population outside the city limits was steadily supplanting the region’s working-class, heavily unionized roots. To win, Toomey would have to play up union antipathy in the suburbs while preserving a pro-worker image among the district’s still sizable blue-collar population — and that’s exactly what he did.

“He’s labeled ‘Wall Street’ and he is,” grouses Ed O’Brien, the union leader who challenged Toomey for his House seat in 2000 and 2002. But try as he might to make the race about Toomey’s financial-sector roots, his support for a regressive flat tax, and his disregard for worker safety regulations, O’Brien couldn’t make the label stick.

“In 2000 [Toomey] defeated me by a little over four percentage points, and I think what put him in then was a lot of the independents were a little bit leery because he just tagged me as a union boss,” notes O’Brien. “He can communicate, there’s absolutely no question about it.”

“The thing of it was that he was able to convince people he was a moderate and make them leery of me,” O’Brien adds. “I was against this, that and that. He called me puppet of trial lawyers. He had more money from the trial lawyers than i did!”

But Toomey also needed to steal from O’Brien’s working-class base, and he succeeded by campaigning aggressively on his blue-collar origins and brief stint as a small-business owner.

Sometimes he got in trouble for going too far. When labor groups got hold of a Toomey staffer’s memo asking Republican supporters to “dress the part of a blue-collar worker” by showing up in work boots and denim shirts for a television ad, some picketed outside the shoot.

“Wear working shoes and shirts and they’ll provide a hard hat,” recalls O’Brien. “One ad was with a guy who was supposedly on an assembly line and talking badly about me. Let’s put it this way. I never took things personal. When he defeated me, I was gracious after. But what irritates me more than anything is when I do see him doing ads where he has supposed labor people involved. That’s what really really bothers me.”

Staying on Message

But what bothered O’Brien sat well enough with the rest of Toomey’s district, which voted him to three consecutive terms in the House, and he made clear, in true Cincinnatus-like fashion, that he wouldn’t seek re-election beyond that. His decision was based on a pledge to serve only three terms, but it also didn’t hurt that Sen. Arlen Specter, a then-Republican who looked vulnerable to a right-wing challenge, was up for re-election.

When Toomey formally announced in February 2003 he’d challenge Specter in the Republican primary in 2004, he incurred a lot of ill will from many members of the GOP establishment. But even here, in an internecine race in which Toomey had to assume the mantle of right-wing firebrand, he kept his cool in the face of bitter attacks from the camp of “Snarlin’ Arlen.”

“Toomey is a smart, disciplined campaigner,” says Christopher Nicholas, who served as Specter’s campaign manager at the time. “And in 2004 we threw everything but the kitchen sink at him, and there were only maybe one or two times that we kind of got him off message and playing defense.”

Indeed, Specter’s camp came up with all kinds of hopeful character assassination plots, including a memo that detailed 11 “incidents,” including a liquor control violation later overturned on appeal and a number of small crimes, perpetrated in and around Toomey’s formerly owned restaurants and sports bars in the Allentown area, in an attempt to cast doubt on the degree to which his establishments truly contributed to the community. It also noted two lawsuits against Toomey Inc., one of which was settled for $75,000 when an intoxicated patron was killed in a car accident after leaving a Toomey establishment.

In spite of it all, Toomey stayed on message. “I’ve been winning in a Democratic district with a principled conservative message,” he told supporters wary of his statewide chances at the time.

“He was very disciplined, very focused, and he just kept saying [Specter] had been too liberal for too long,” Nicholas notes.

In the end, Specter beat Toomey for the nomination, but only by about 17,000 votes out of over a million cast. It was the only race in which Toomey ever came up short, but even here it’s widely agreed that he would probably have won had President Bush and Pennsylvania’s other senator, Rick Santorum, not come to Specter’s rescue.

Following the election, however, Toomey refrained from lashing out at the Republican establishment that failed to get behind him. Instead, he became the president of the Club for Growth, the conservative anti-tax group that was seeking to remake the Republican Party by recruiting and supporting candidates that would challenge it from the right.

The Club had backed Toomey heavily in his failed bid against Specter, and it proved the perfect platform for him to bide his time through a couple of election cycles that were none too favorable to Republicans, all the while handing out large chunks of money and buying goodwill from conservative candidates who shared his passion for moving the GOP to the right.

Nicholas, who also worked for the moderate Sen. Lincoln Chaffee (R-R.I.) before Toomey and the Club put him in their crosshairs for a ring-wing challenge in 2006, said that even then, Toomey’s campaign work never felt personal.

“He never appeared in any of those things. He was always the cheerleader and the fundraiser behind the scenes,” Nicholas recalls. “When I did a campaign for moderate Republicans I didn’t feel like I was squaring off against the Club for Growth. He didn’t adopt this kind of mano-a-mano thing. He didn’t operate that way.”

Being the Bigger Man

When Toomey first dropped hints about another Senate bid in 2010, the Republican Party establishment was wary. The Club for Growth had drawn the ire of popular GOP figures like Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee, who famously termed it the “Club for Greed,” and local pols wondered if he wasn’t too far to the right for Pennsylvania.

But when Specter voted for President Obama’s stimulus package, the mood among rank-and-file Republicans shifted wildly against him. Toomey began polling so favorably in match-ups with Specter in a GOP primary that it was only a matter of time before Specter fled the party for good.

Even then, the state’s own GOP Party Chairman, Rob Gleason, tried to enlist former governor Tom Ridge (R-Pa.) to challenge Specter, explaining later to Politico that “Toomey still had a reputation for being a staunch conservative.” But Ridge declined and Toomey was left with an open path to the nomination.

Once firmly ensconced as his party’s frontrunner, however, Toomey quickly reverted back to the candidate who’d fought and won tough races in the Democrat-heavy 15th District. While Sestak and Specter were forced to duke it out in a tough Democratic primary, Toomey quickly set about reclaiming political middle. America had shifted dangerously to the left, he framed his message, and he felt duty bound to return to politics and set it back firmly in the center.

“I think we now have the most liberal elected government in the history of the republic,” he told the American Spectator last April. “I think they are very consciously and systematically attempting to take America on a huge lurch to the left, to really remake our society in a fashion similar to a European-style welfare state.”

“He’s transitioned very well from outside challenger mode to endorsed candidate mode,” observes Nicholas. “I think that speaks to Mr. Toomey’s experience and the fact that he didn’t have a tough primary. The environment shifted in Toomey’s favor and he was adroit enough to leverage that.”

It didn’t matter that Toomey had thrown his weight behind Sharron Angle and other radical candidates at the Club for Growth, or that he’d been a head cheerleader of the deregulation of the financial services industry while in Congress. What mattered was that, when Specter attempted to discredit Sestak’s Navy career in an attack ad during the Democratic primary, it was Toomey, of all people, who came to Sestak’s defense.

“Joe Sestak and I have already engaged in two spirited yet civil debates,” Toomey wrote in a letter asking Specter to take down the ad. “Pennsylvanians can rightly expect that we would continue in that manner, which is not only respectful to each other, but more importantly, respectful to voters.”

In fact, Toomey consistently made it known that he liked his challenger, Mr. Sestak, notwithstanding the fact that his views were obviously far to the left of the average Pennsylvanian.

“[Sestak is] a good and honorable man and very dedicated to the liberal principles that he believes in,” Toomey likes to tell the media with only the smallest hint of irony. His campaign even chose to run an amusingly cordial ad that began, “For Senate, Joe Sestak or Pat Toomey. Two good men with very different ideas.”

Entering the Home Stretch

It’s the way Toomey carries himself, however, that looks like it’s going to prove crucial in carrying his mild manners and his less mild political beliefs to Washington once more. Unlike Ken Buck, or Sharron Angle, or Rand Paul, he’s managed to couch the same policy positions in a sensible, even boring manner that’s comforted, rather than repelled, the Pennsylvania voters Toomey needs most to win.

“You’d never have convinced me then that anyone more conservative than Rick Santorum would have been able to win statewide,” says O’Brien. “But now it looks like it’s possible.”

The first — and most surprising — item concerns Gov. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who a new Public Policy Polling survey shows trailing his GOP opponent John Raese 46 percent to 43 percent in the race to fill the late Sen. Robert Byrd’s (D-W.Va.) Senate seat. Just months before, soon after Manchin signaled his intention to run, most preliminary polls put him up by at least 20 points, but since then his lead has steadily diminished. The poll results are also coming out at the same time as revelations that a federal probe into highways built in West Virginia is being focused, at least in part, on a $150 million road that connects I-79 to to Fairmont, Manchin’s hometown — but any connection to the governor’s office at this stage is circumstantial at best.

Meanwhile, new polls showing former Rep. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) holding a steady 7 point lead over Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) in the race to replace Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) are causing come forecasters to recategorize it from “toss up” to “lean Republican.” But anyone who followed Sestak’s come-from-behind victory over Specter in the primary knows it’s too soon to say anything for sure: “Pat Toomey is in a good place, ahead by 7 points with six weeks to go. But Congressman Joe Sestak has proven himself a tough competitor so it’s too early to order the champagne,” Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said in a statement.

Finally, a new CNN/Time/Opinion Research poll indicates that Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) is falling behind Weld County DA and tea party–backed candidate, Ken Buck, in Colorado’s Senate race. The difference in the race seems to be all about the enthusiasm gap that’s plaguing Democrats around the country, pundits note: Buck leads Bennet 49 percent to 44 percent among likely voters. When registered voters are polled, however, Bennet takes 47 percent to Buck’s 44 percent. Getting those 2008 Obama voters out to the polls for Bennet, in other words, is a must-do if he hopes to keep his seat.

At least Democrats can still be thankful that Christine O’Donnell is the GOP Senate candidate in Delaware.

Miller was happy to give credit where credit was due: “I’m absolutely certain that was pivotal,” he said of Palin’s endorsement to the Anchorage Daily News. Murkowski, for her part, took a jab at the former half-term Alaska governor, arguing, ”I think she’s out for her own self-interest. I don’t think she’s out for Alaska’s interest.”

If Miller holds on to win, it will be the third time an incumbent senator has been unseated in a primary contest this season — the first two being Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) and Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.). His victory will also represent a strong caveat to pollsters and pundits — low turnout primaries are notoriously difficult to predict, so perhaps a little more humility will be in order in the future.

Romanoff, like Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) who took on incumbent Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) in May, is mounting a liberal challenge to the Democratic establishment’s pick — and he’s getting a boost of support from the majority of younger, Hispanic, and “liberal” voters in the state, a Denver Post and 9News survey showed. Also like Sestak, he’s leapt back from a huge deficit — 17 points in Romanoff’s case — and now has the momentum going into the final full week of campaigning.

One of the few things working against Romanoff at this moment is Colorado’s mail-in system of voting, used in most counties, through which about 40 percent of expected voters are estimated to have already cast ballots. Romanoff has to hope that enough supporters are energized by his recent surge to show up at the polls next week in order to swing the election his way.

The vote broke largely on partisan lines — all 12 Democrats on the committee voted for Kagan while six of the seven Republicans voted against her. Only Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) broke GOP ranks to vote in her favor.

As Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) spoke about his decision to vote for Kagan, he bemoaned the committee’s partisan divide on the vote, noting that it reflects the battle over the Court’s ideological bent. He added that despite Republican colleagues’ concerns about Kagan’s association with former Justice Thurgood Marshall, he hoped she would follow his example.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said prior to the vote that he felt partisan divisions would prevent Kagan from garnering more than a few Republican votes in the full Senate.

“Sadly, it appears election-year politics may deprive her of the vote total that her nomination deserves,” he said.

The committee’s endorsement of Kagan was never in doubt — just the margin. Attention today focused on Graham, the only swing vote whose stance on Kagan was unknown going into today’s session. He was always the Republican most likely to break ranks in Kagan’s favor — he was the only member of his party to support Justice Sonia Sotomayor during her confirmation last year.

Graham noted as he announced his decision earlier today that while he would not have nominated a justice who shared Kagan’s political ideology, Obama had a mandate from the voters to choose a nominee.

“I’m going to vote for her because I believe this last election had consequences,” he said.

Other committee Republicans were not so charitable, using their time today to criticize Kagan’s lack of judicial experience and her stances on some hot-button issues.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the committee’s ranking member, criticized Kagan in part because she had restricted military recruiters while dean of Harvard Law School. He and other Republicans brought up that issue repeatedly during Kagan’s confirmation hearings.

“Throughout her career, Ms. Kagan has placed her politics above the law,” Sessions wrote in a USA Today op-ed published today.

C-SPAN reported that the full Senate will likely take up Kagan’s confirmation starting Aug. 2.

Updated at 1:12 p.m.

Specter damned Kagan with faint praise in the USA Today op-ed, saying that while he believes she has “an impressive legal mind, a ready humor and a collegial temperament suitable to the court,” she also failed to “undo the impression that nominating hearings are little more than a charade.”

He wrote that that Kagan did not heed her own criticisms about previous hearings lacking candor — most famously in a 1995 University of Chicago Law Review article. “She accused Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer of stonewalling, but then she did the same, leaving senators to search for clues on her judicial philosophy,” he said in the op-ed.

Specter did, however, praise Kagan for being in favor of letting cameras into the Court’s hearings. “Her testimony recognized that the court is a public institution that should be available to all Americans, not just the select few who can travel to Washington,” he wrote.

In many ways, Specter was the biggest wild-card on the committee. While still a Republican, he had voted against confirming Kagan as Solicitor General last year. But when President Obama nominated her on May 10, a little over a week before Specter lost his first Democratic Senate primary, he said he would look at her with an open mind. Given that he was no longer burdened by electoral concerns once Kagan actually came before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I believed he might vote against her yet again — he had been by far the Democrats’ toughest questioner during Kagan’s testimony.

Specter’s endorsement means Kagan will almost certainly have 12 senators in favor of endorsing her — and maybe a 13th if Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) decides to buck his party. The committee is scheduled to vote on Kagan this coming Tuesday, while the full Senate will consider her after that.

Obviously this is not totally unexpected, as Hatch was fairly hostile towards Kagan during her testimony earlier this week. However, he did vote for her when she was up for Solicitor General last year. It’s also worth noting that he voted against Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation when she went before the committee last year.

Thus far Hatch is the only member of the committee to state publicly how he will vote on Kagan, though other senators are expected to make their own statements over the course of the day.

I think it’s safe to assume that all but one of the Democrats on the committee are definitely in Kagan’s favor. Most Judiciary Democrats spent their time during the hearings bashing the Court’s recent decisions on cases like Citizens United v. FEC, so it’s clear they have no issues with Kagan herself. The only one on the fence is, most likely, Arlen Specter (Pa.). As I have previously reported, he has faced a dilemma on how to vote on Kagan since Obama announced her nomination back in May. He voted against her for Solicitor General because he felt she had not fully answered his questions. Specter indicated he was not getting sufficiently detailed answers from Kagan this time around either.

Specter voted with the rest of the Democrats to confirm Sotomayor. But given that he is no longer constrained by the pressures of an election campaign — and the Democratic purse strings that would accompany such a race — he is basically free to vote as he pleases this time around.

Handicapping the Judiciary Republicans is much more difficult. Several of the GOP members took a negative tack during the hearings, especially with regard to Kagan’s handling of military recruiters while dean of Harvard Law School, so it is likely that no more than one or two of them will vote in her favor. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) is by far the most likely Republican “Yes” vote at this point, as he was Sotomayor’s only Judiciary GOP supporter.

Kagan is basically assured to move out of the committee with a favorable vote, as Democrats hold a 12-7 majority. A vote before the entire Senate is likely to occur late this month.

Specter referenced a 1995 University of Chicago Law Review article in which Kagan criticized the tone of Supreme Court confirmation hearings and encouraged nominees to more freely discuss their views. He voted against Kagan when she was up for solicitor general because he felt she had not fully answered his questions. In the midst of what ended up being a failed primary bid for another term in office, Specter had said he would look at Kagan with an open mind.

While still a Republican, Specter oversaw the Senate Judiciary Committee during the nominations of Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justice Samuel Alito and failed nominee Harriet Miers.