The metaphors were mixed but the message was clear: Pennsylvania Democratic Party chairman Jim Burn wants to tear down the image of Pat Toomey as a candidate for all Pennsylvanians.

In a conference call with reporters Thursday, Burn emerged from a post-primary reorganization of the state party leadership to take aim at Toomey, the former Lehigh Valley congressman and former Wall Street derivatives trader. Burn accused Toomey of channeling citizen anxiety about the economy onto the bailouts and stimulus packages enacted since late 2008.

“He’s focused that angst on the band-aid, not the disease, but we’re going to tell voters in Pennsylvania what’s really going on,” Burn said. “His actions [in Congress and as president of conservative Club for Growth] created the shell game. It was a deception and he wants to say the cure is what’s wrong. He created the sickness.

The criticism comes as Democrats have dug up three separate videos featuring Toomey during his stint in Congress, including this from C-SPAN in 1999, when he called for the relaxation of regulation against credit default swaps, and this video from 2000, when he urged the House to deregulate the financial industry.

Toomey’s campaign, for its part, has stayed on message.

“With every independent poll showing Toomey with a big lead, and with [Democrat Joe] Sestak’s Washington allies spending a million dollars in two weeks running attack ads that numerous independent analysts are calling ‘false,; it’s pretty clear that the Sestak campaign has reached a new level of desperation,” spokeswoman Nachama Soloveichik said. “Take away all the smoke and mirrors from the Sestak campaign, and you are left with this indisputable fact: Joe Sestak supported, and Pat Toomey opposed, the biggest gift Washington politicians have ever given Wall Street, and that is the $700-billion bailout paid for by Pennsylvania taxpayers.”

Tom Lingenfelter’s latest campaign to represent the 8th Congressional District has ended before it really even began.

Lingenfelter, who was running as an independent, called it quits Thursday in the face of a ballot challenge. Lawyers involved in the case said his withdrawal came after a marathon, all-day court hearing in Harrisburg.

“It was very close, but the progression of numbers didn’t go our way,” said Larry Otter, Lingenfelter’s lawyer. Otter said an early-morning ruling that signatures gathered by some circulators made it tough for Lingenfelter to clear the already-high signature requirements.

“Mr. Lingenfelter would have added a lot to the debates,” said Otter, a Democrat. “He would have raised a lot of uncomfortable questions for [Republican Mike] Fitzpatrick and [Congressman Patrick] Murphy. Fitzpatrick was scared and pulled out all the stops to make sure Tom was not on the ballot.”

It was Lingenfelter’s third time running in the Bucks County district in as many cycles. But he entered the race only days before the deadline for submitting signatures to get on the ballot. Fitzpatrick’s campaign supported the challenge against Lingenfelter, who stood to siphon conservative votes from the GOP nominee.

“There is a process to follow to get on the ballot, and Tom Lingenfelter did not follow that process,” a Fitzpatrick spokesman said late Thursday. “He made a wise decision to withdraw.”

Lingenfelter is still on the ballot in a local state House race. He could not immediately be reached for comment.

The public polls say Republican Pat Toomey is up by nine points in the Senate race. Democrats say “not so fast.”

A Democratic operative somewhere must have been peeved by all the coverage these polls get, because MSNBC got its hands on an internal poll. The results? Toomey’s leading Joe Sestak by two points, 46 percent to 44 percent. We weren’t able to get our hands on any of this polling data Thursday—so the usual caveats apply more than usual. Take it with a grain of salt or two.

Meanwhile, the party’s gubernatorial candidate just loves telling us about all the money he’s raising. Dan Onorato’s campaign once again boasted some fundraising numbers Thursday, saying it’s raked in more than $1 million in just the last 17 days. That makes more than $4.4 million raised since the May primary, and more than $14 million throughout the campaign. We won’t know until late September how Onorato is faring against Republican Tom Corbett, who entered the general election cycle with a solid cash advantage thanks to a much easier primary.

“We are very pleased with the support we’ve received for Dan’s message of economic growth and reform,” campaign manager Kevin Kinross said, “and we are confident our campaign will have the resources to win.”

Also Thursday, Republican Mike Fitzpatrick boasted some support from his 8th District congressional bid from the small business community. Fitzpatrick, who’s trying to take back the seat he lost to Democrat Patrick Murphy in 2006, was endorsed Thursday by the National Federation of Independent Business. The endorsement was announced at a news conference in Doylestown.

“The differences in this race couldn’t be more clear,” Lisa Goeas, the federation’s vice president for political operations, said in a statement later. “Mike Fitzpatrick is a business leader who is a vocal opponent of increased government spending, and advocates for less regulation and fewer taxes so small businesses will have a greater incentive to grow and hire. [Congressman] Murphy has not been a friend to small business, as evidenced by his voting record. His votes against small business supporting the new health care law and cap-and-trade legislation prove that he doesn’t understand the negative impact expensive legislation like that will have on Pennsylvania’s job creators.”

And finally, our friends at CQ Politics had a good piece about the race in the 15th District and incumbent Republican Charlie Dent. Some of the takeaways? Dent is one of the only incumbents the GOP thinks is vulnerable, but not that vulnerable because, hey, even Democrats think he’s not such a bad fellow. As one Callahan supporter conceded: “Charlie Dent is a nice guy.”

Democrat Joe Sestak gets profiled by The New York Times Magazine.

Check it out.

A builders’ trade group in western Pennsylvania is running a radio ad against Democrat Dan Onorato, accusing the gubernatorial candidate and Allegheny County executive of helping union “special interests” by requiring that most of a new community college science center be built by unionized workers.

The Tribune-Review first reported on the 60-second spot from the Associated Builders & Contractors of Western Pennsylvania. The issue at hand is a so-called Project Labor Agreement for the $21-million science center project at the Community College of Allegheny County. The trade group sued after the college stipulated that amount 90 percent of workers on the project would be unionized, and the labor agreement is now being reviewed.

Onorato’s office said allegations in the ad “completely false.”

“This is clearly a political advertisement by a special-interest group,” county spokeswoman Megan Dardanell told the newspaper. “Everyone—union and nonunion—are able to bid.”

Onorato’s campaign was quick to push back this week. Despite the fact that Republican Tom Corbett’s campaign did not run the ad, Onorato’s campaign noted that the building trade group’s statewide PAC has given money to Corbett.

“Tom Corbett has represented big business over average Pennsylvanians every step of his career and every day of this campaign,” Onorato spokesman Brian Herman said, “and his corporate donor allies are now returning the favor.”

The Tribune-Review reports that Corbett actually declined to sign a pledge the trade group is circulating, which commits a candidate not to use Project Labor Agreements that limit non-union workers.

“Whether a PLA is necessary for a project should be decided based upon the labor needs, cost and workforce unique to it and the availability of the local workforce,” a Corbett campaign spokesman told the newspaper.

The Libertarian Party’s slate of statewide candidates has officially been sent packing.

The party’s candidates for senate, governor and lieutenant governor all ended their bids to stay on the ballot Wednesday, succumbing to legal challenges spearheaded by the state GOP. Coupled with the withdrawal of a Green Party candidate for senate and another candidate for governor, the latest exits mean there will be no third-party candidates on the statewide ballot in November.

Senate hopeful Douglas Jamison, gubernatorial candidate Marakay Rogers and lieutenant governor aspirant Kat Valleley all conceded that they didn’t have enough valid signatures to gain ballot access, their lawyer told The Associated Press.

When Tom Lingenfelter goes to Harrisburg Thursday to defend his right to be on the 8th Congressional District ballot, he’ll have the help of veteran election lawyer Larry Otter.

Otter, a Bucks County attorney who has been involved in a plethora of ballot cases, is representing Lingenfelter.

“I know we should win,” Linenfelter told pa2010.com. “If the law is based on fairness and logic, we should win.”

Otter declined to comment on the case in detail. A Democrat, Otter has also made runs for local prothonotary, district attorney and judge.

Republican Mike Fitzpatrick, who stands to lose votes conservative votes if Lingenfelter is on the ballot, has voiced support for the challenge.

You know that enduring image of a room full of monkeys on typewriters? Well, somewhere in Washington, the Democratic Party must have a roomful of monkeys looking back at every word Pat Toomey ever said as a congressman.

OK, not that research interns are monkeys. But the party is obviously working hard on this, because it keeps dredging up old videos of the Republican Senate nominee talking about derivatives. We already reported on the first video, from a 1999 floor speech. As Democrats seek to bolster their argument that Toomey is some kind of risky-derivatives-apologist, two more have come to light.

The second was reported by The Inquirer. In that one, Toomey said that a 2000 deregulatory measure would “allow greater flexibility in the electronic trading” of over-the-counter derivatives (the bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support). And the third one was reported by The Morning Call, which cited Toomey as saying in 2003 that such derivatives are “perhaps the most important, creative and innovative development in finance in the last 30 years.”

Democrats called it a “hat trick.” This after they got burned over their ad blaming him for developing the derivatives that brought down the economy.

Speaking of Toomey, our friends at The Morning Call also tell us that he’ll soon be embarking on a “more jobs, less government” tour. That mantra, is of course, a mainstay of his campaign ads.

Meanwhile, political forecaster extraordinaire Charlie Cook and his Cook Political Report have decided a couple of House races in Pennsylvania just got more competitive. The 8th Congressional District was moved from Leans Democratic to Toss Up, while the 10th District was moved from Likely Democratic to Lean Democratic. In both races, Democratic incumbents have fundraising advantages that many expect will help them survive the GOP-friendly political climate. But Cook says there’s reason for Democrats to worry.

“Very little polling has been released on where the race in this Bucks County-based district stands,” Cook wrote about the 8th, “but if [Democrat Patrick] Murphy was only able to unseat Republican Mike Fitzpatrick by 1,518 votes in 2006, it’s hard to see how four years in Washington gets him in a much better position for a rematch in this kind of political environment.”

As for the 10th: “…this district’s strong GOP tilt and [Chris] Carney’s vote for health care reform mean Democrats will need to spend lots of money to keep the seat in their column in November, regardless of how serious a threat [Tom] Marino appears today.”

And a couple weeks after Democrat Manan Trivedi trotted out veterans on video to strike back at Congressman Jim Gerlach’s (R-6) attacks on his residency, Gerlach’s campaign released its own Web video (embedded at bottom), replete with veterans talking up the 6th District Republican. “I know Jim Gerlach,” one vet says in the video. “I don’t know Trivedi. I don’t think he really knows this district. Not the way Jim does.”

Republican Tom Corbett continues to hold a steady, double-digit lead in the race for governor, according to two new polls.

The Rasmussen survey released Wednesday found Corbett, the state attorney general, leading Democratic nominee Dan Onorato by 10 points, 48 percent to 38 percent. Nine percent of voters are still undecided and five percent prefer another candidate, according to the poll.

And a Public Policy Polling survey showed Corbett up 13 points, 48 percent to 35 percent; 17 percent of respondents said they were undecided.

Corbett has led by low double-digits or high single-digits for months in most public polls. He led by 11 points in Rasmussen’s survey last month. The Public Policy Polling survey seems to have a questionable sample of voters, because those respondents reported casting their 2008 votes in favor of John McCain by one percentage point; Obama won the state by 10 points. Corbett’s lead still increased by three points from a similar sample in June.

The Rasmussen survey of 750 likely voters, conducted Aug. 16, had a margin of error of four percent. The Public Policy Polling survey of 585 likely voters, conducted Aug. 14-16, had a margin of error of 4.1 percent.

This article was updated to reflect results of a second poll.

In May, a friend of mine mentioned that he registered as a Democrat so that he could vote in the primary and the next day he switched back to register as an Independent. As I tried to convince him that there was a benefit to registering with a party and being able to vote in primaries, he made the same insistence that so many very serious people make at election time, that he votes for the person, not the party.

I say that is a lot of hogwash.

People are always trying to elevate politics to rest upon a pedestal, and so see voting along party lines as some sort of vile act that is beneath them. I imagine that there is a fear of seeming to be beholden to a party and not wanting to come across as incapable of thinking for yourself. That is reasonable, but I would like to make a defense of partisanship.

For as much as people complain about the Democratic and Republican parties becoming too similar in their shortcomings, the truth is that they are still very different. A Republican majority would have pushed very different legislation than the current Democratic majorities in Congress, for better or for worse. When you are voting for a candidate, you are also voting for the party that candidate belongs to and saying, in essence, that their party should have another seat towards a majority.

To many, this is a negative, but why? It is a perfectly reasonable rationale to vote. A lot of pro-choice liberals were uncomfortable with Bob Casey’s bid for Senate in 2006, but a vote for Casey was also a vote toward a Democratic majority in the Senate, which meant a very different policy on reproductive rights than a Republican majority would have pushed. Likewise, in 2004, many conservative Republicans were uncomfortable with Arlen Specter’s moderate positions on issues like abortion and the economy, but, at the time, a vote for Specter meant a vote toward a Republican majority.

The same is true on the state level. State lawmakers are often more approachable because they have smaller districts than members of Congress, but members of the legislature still vote more often with their party than against it. If they were voting against their party a majority of the time, it would make sense to just switch to the other party, wouldn’t it?

However, voters often are very willing to vote for a candidate from a different party than their own under the rationale that the legislator is moderate or is responsive to the needs of the district or some other admirable trait. Again, these are good reasons to vote for a candidate, but one shouldn’t be ashamed of also including political party as part of their voting criteria. Sure, your state representative may sound moderate, but I would be willing to bet that they vote over 90 percent with their party and if that party isn’t the one you subscribe to, that means they are quite often voting the opposite of what you would want.

Even candidates themselves try to play the faux anti-partisan game. Every election, candidates say things like they are an “independent voice,” which is, on its face, utterly ridiculous. Now, I am sure that every politician does do their best to vote for the interests of their district first. New York representatives voiced concerns over financial regulatory reform and senators in the Midwest voted for farm legislation for their states instead of just along party lines.

However, every candidate who campaigns on being an “independent voice” is still going to overwhelmingly vote with their party, and that’s OK. In fact, it gives us another reason to vote for or against them in the next election. I would contend that if candidates proudly ran with their party instead of running from it every election, they would help put their party in a more favorable light and possibly not just help their own campaign, but help other candidates of their party up and down the ballot.

So let’s eschew the veil of independence and embrace the virtue of voting along partisan lines. Remember that when you are voting for Congress, you’re not only voting for that candidate, you’re indirectly voting for either Nancy Pelosi or John Boehner, and you’re voting for a very different set of values, agendas, and policy goals. Some criticize Joe Sestak for comparing Pat Toomey to Rand Paul and Sharron Angle, but, to be fair, if all three of those candidates were to win in November, Toomey would, in fact, vote with both of those two Senators far more often than he would vote against them.

But I’m sure Pat Toomey would disagree with that analysis. He would want you to think he would be an independent voice. Unless the letter next to him is an “I,” voters should know better.

Pat Toomey says that not only did the 2009 economic stimulus package not work, but it probably made things worse.

The GOP Senate nominee said Wednesday that the economy would “probably have bounced back much more strongly” without the stimulus, “because borrowing and spending doesn’t get you to prosperity.”

“We were promised that unemployment wouldn’t reach eight percent, it went over 10 percent,” Toomey said on Fox29.

Toomey has attacked the stimulus as having failed in both public appearances and campaign TV ads. Unemployment aside, even some conservative economists credit the measure with having saved and created some jobs. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said that, as of March, the stimulus was responsible for employing between 1.2 and 2.8 million people, shaving as much as 1.5 percentage points off a potentially higher unemployment rate. FactCheck.org recently took issue with one of his TV ad’s claims about the stimulus.

Toomey also voiced support for extending the Bush administration tax cuts. When an interviewer noted that the tax cuts aren’t paid for, Toomey responded: “So what do you want to do? You want to raise taxes massively at a time like this? I think that makes no sense at all.”

See video of Toomey’s Fox29 appearance below.

On Tuesday we reported on a series of surveys, conducted by a GOP pollster and commissioned by a prominent conservative group. These polls found GOP challengers in good shape in four competitive Keystone State House races.

At the time, we didn’t have any documentation about the polling methodology, questions or anything else. So naturally, as always, we reported the results with a great deal of skepticism.

Well, we now have our hands on a significant amount of data from the polls, including toplines and crosstabs. We haven’t reviewed every inch of data here, and it’s always a question as to how pollster pick their samples. But the polls seem pretty darn legitimate. No push-poll style questions or flimsy methodology.

So what’s the takeaway? Obviously, Democrats of all stripes in any competitive district are in trouble. And less than three months before Election Day, that trouble is serious enough that voters say they’ll support a candidate they don’t really even know.

Whether that will remain their answer as Nov. 2 approaches in another matter, and here’s where the skepticism is still warranted. It’s one thing to say you’ll vote for a guy you’ve never heard just because he’s not the incumbent to a pollster. It’s another thing to actually pull the lever for that guy once you’re in the booth.

This is especially true in races like the 10th District, where the poll found Republican Tom Marino leading incumbent Democrat Chris Carney despite Marino still lacking wide name recognition. Marino has the climate on his side. But the particular circumstances are a different story. Marino is vastly underfunded, and Carney will have every opportunity to define the opposition on his own terms.

Anyway, you can review the polling data for yourself.

Here’s the memo, toplines and tabs for the 3rd District.

Here’s the memo, toplines and tabs for the 10th District.

Here’s the memo, toplines and tabs for the 11th District.

Here’s the memo, toplines and tabs for the 12th District.

Enjoy being buried in numbers.

If you’re a candidate for U.S. House, watch out: Someone might be waiting around the corner with a camera to ask how you intend to cast your vote for Speaker.

Videos has surfaced on the Internet of candidates being grilled on the subject—and more often than not in the case of Pennsylvania candidates, giving boilerplate answers of “I’m focused on my race.” The videos are being posted on YouTube by the Speaker Education Project, which bills itself as a “nonprofit effort dedicated to educating the public about the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives.” It’s part of the conservative group Americans for Limited Government.

So far, the group appears to have caught up with five House candidates in Pennsylvania: both candidates in the 3rd and 4th Congressional Districts, and 11th District GOP hopeful Lou Barletta. Of those five candidates, only 3rd District Republican Mike Kelly seemed happy to say he’ll vote for current Minority Leader John Boehner.

Congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper (D-3), a close ally of Nancy Pelosi after her role in shaping health care reform legislation, declined to answer.

“I’m worried about my race, that’s all I’m worried about right now,” Dahlkemper said.

See video of her encounter with the Speaker Education Project below.

A prominent conservative group launched a major advertising campaign this week to decry congressional spending—and five competitive House races in Pennsylvania are among the group’s targets.

The ad from Americans for Prosperity decries last year’s economic stimulus package as wasteful spending. It was already seen airing in the 3rd Congressional District this week, where incumbent Democrat Kathy Dahlkemper’s campaign was quick to push back with an e-mail to supporters.

How much is being spent for airtime in Keystone State districts remains unclear. But news reports indicate that it is also running in the 6th, 7th, 10th and 11th Districts.

See the ad below.

PHILADELPHIA—Did you miss the 20th annual Candidates Comedy Night here Tuesday?

Don’t fret. We’ve got a highlight reel for your enjoyment.

And don’t forget to check out our Candidate Comedy Awards.

See the highlight reel below.

Not too long after we took Democrats to task for their latest ad hitting Republican Pat Toomey, FactCheck.org went after Toomey himself for his most recent ad.

The ultimate referees issued some similar findings to what we said when we first reported on Toomey’s ad earlier this week, though we’ll give them credit for blowing the whistle louder and more effectively. The crux of it: Toomey is wrong to say the stimulus package “gave us record debt without creating jobs”—because the debt is piling up thanks to unsustainable entitlement spending, and yes, the stimulus definitely did create some jobs.

“Toomey would be on safe ground if he said the stimulus added to the debt without creating enough jobs—those would be his opinions, and defensible ones at that,” the Web site concludes. “But he can’t say it didn’t create any jobs and caused a record debt.”

The Toomey people couldn’t exactly argue with FactCheck.org on Friday—only hours earlier they had trumpeted some of its earlier findings to make the case that the Democrats had misfired with their ad.

But don’t expect this larger debate to leave the campaign trail anytime soon.

Meanwhile, Republican gubernatorial nominee Tom Corbett is set to hit the road with a little bus tour. It looks like he’ll be doing a bunch of these as the election heats up, but his campaign said the first tour would be a six-county swing through northwest Pennsylvania on Saturday. He’ll talk about “bringing jobs and fiscal discipline” to the state.

“The media is not permitted on the Tom Corbett for Governor bus,” the campaign said, “but are welcome to attend any of the events on the bus tour.”

Shucks. Just when we thought he could emerge as a media darling a la John McCain’s Straight Talk Express.

Also, House Minority Leader John Boehner has another stop during his massive Pennsylvania tour: a Saturday breakfast for 11th District candidate Lou Barletta. The event is $25 per head, and that makes seven GOP House candidates who are benefiting from Boehener’s Keystone State travels.

And finally, there’s a grassroots advocacy group that’s sick of all the ballot challenges. There’s plenty of them to be sick of, including challenges to the entire Libertarian Party’s statewide ticket, a Green Party senate challenge and third-party House candidates being challenged in competitive races. The group, VotePA, called for all Democrats and Republicans to withdraw their ballot challenges—unless, that is, their are claims of “willful election fraud” at play.

“Challenging candidate nominations in a court of law is serious business that can hurt the democratic process for everyone,” the group said in a statement. “Legal challenges should be reserved for situation with clear evidence of deliberate petitioning fraud or other lawbreaking. Challenges should never be allowed to appear as a partisan attempt by one political party or candidate to manipulate, suppress, or remove the nominations of another. Pennsylvania’s system needs to be changed to prevent this.”

So, when are the court hearings?

The Democratic Party’s liberal conscience is coming to southeast Pennsylvania next month to raise some campaign cash for Bryan Lentz and Manan Trivedi.

Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, Democratic National Committee chairman and presidential candidate, will be in suburban Philadelphia on Sept. 22 for a joint fundraiser benefiting the two congressional candidates. The evening event is set to be held at state Senator Daylin Leach’s home in Wayne.

Trivedi is running in the 6th District while Lentz is seeking the open seat in the 7th. Both face better-funded opponents, but Dean remains a solid fundraising draw for the party faithful who could help them narrow the money gap.

Loyal readers will surely remember our coverage of Republican Pat Meehan’s June news conference in Harrisburg, when the 7th District congressional candidate said he’d call into question his opponent’s “fitness” for office but then mostly rehashed old Bonusgate info.

We got some flak at the time, not surprisingly so. But we made one important promise: The Meehan campaign referenced a court document as evidence to back up its claims that Lentz was a “key beneficiary” of the legislative corruption scandal, and pa2010.com committed itself to “independently assess the full document.”

Well, thanks to a very helpful Judge Richard Lewis, yours truly recently made a trip to Harrisburg to give the document a look at the Dauphin County Courthouse. What I learned confirmed pretty much what I had expected: Team Meehan had its facts right, but the larger context was still, to put it generously, very incomplete.

More than two-dozen staffers of the state House Democratic Caucus did indeed do some work on behalf of Lentz’s election to the state House in 2006. The vast majority worked on the campaign for only one day, after Lentz won an online contest to receive a “campaign invasion” of volunteers for a day of canvassing. Others did research from within the Capitol on behalf of the party’s House campaign committee. Only one could possibly be called a “Lentz staffer” by any stretch.

Here’s the important point: The Meehan campaign’s attack hinged on a fundamentally flawed understanding of what Bonusgate actually was. In retrospect, I think it was a mistake that my coverage focused more on their rhetorical overreach and less on this dynamic.

Yes, Lentz benefited from Bonusgate. But according to the documentation I saw, more than two-dozen state House candidates across Pennsylvania benefited, too. To say he benefited from Bonusgate is simply to say he was a Democratic candidate for state House in 2006. And the courts have held that it’s the leaders of that conspiracy who are legally responsible, not the candidates who simply had no idea what was happening.

From a purely political standpoint, there’s pretty much unanimity of opinion, among both Democrats and Republicans, that the execution of this attack was botched by the Meehan campaign. I’m confident they now understand that. They kept a relatively lower profile in the aftermath, and didn’t come at Lentz hard again until this whole Jim Schneller fiasco, at which point they had their facts firmly correct and their ducks in a row.

All this having been said, I think it’s a good time to take stock of coverage of this race to date.

Look, I know people have had problems with how the race has been covered by pa2010.com, and I don’t blame them. A confluence of factors—geographical proximity to the district, no primaries, heated competition that started early—have made it the most thoroughly covered contest in the state, one in which we’re playing referee to a greater extent than anywhere else.

For months, the Meehan people were getting smacked back on these pages because they couldn’t get their facts right. More recently, the Lentz people have been subject to that treatment.

These candidates and the people around them share absolutely no love for each other. There is arguably no race in the state so filled with vitriol, and as things have swung back and forth, yours truly has often been caught in the middle. That’s the way it should be.

In an effort to really be honest with myself here, I went back and re-read pretty much every word I’ve ever written about the race (you can do the same by clicking here, but be sure to differentiate between the news stories and the blog/op-ed content). In more than 100 stories dating back to last April, I did find one clear mistake: this article about the Meehan campaign’s unpaid legal bills from fending off a ballot challenge.

There was nothing factually inaccurate about the story, and the crux of it was newsworthy because anything that substantively affects a candidate’s cash-on-hand is important. But the tone of it was completely out of whack. No one was accusing anyone of doing anything improper. So there was no reason for the article to take on such a tone. I offer up my regrets for this misstep.

Now, as we move forward, let’s remember one thing: This race is fun. This is hard-nosed electoral politics at both its best and its worst, exactly the kind of thing that should be candy for an audience of political junkies. I’ve learned a lot from covering it. I just hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have.

Good luck to both the candidates.

Here’s a belated shout-out to Stu Bykofsky, the Daily News columnist and the man who gave us all a fun night of political comedy.

Oh, and here’s his annual write-up of the event.

Democrats are once again going after Republican Senate candidate Pat Toomey, trying to blame his role as a derivatives trader for the financial crisis. But in doing so, the party is relying on an attack that has already been thoroughly discredited.

A new ad from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, embedded at bottom, says Toomey “helped pioneer the use of derivatives” that “wound up nearly destroying our economy.” Toomey was indeed a derivatives trader in 1980s, but he dealt in currency derivatives, whereas the so-called credit default swaps that many blame for contributing to the financial crisis weren’t invented until later.

This was noted by fact-checkers as long ago as April of last year, when FactCheck.org called out Senator Arlen Specter for taking a similar shot at Toomey. Specter’s campaign later adjusted the ad.

The 30-second spot is airing statewide, according to someone familiar with the ad buy. The precise size of the buy is unclear. As of late Friday morning, an independent expenditure report had yet to be published on the Federal Election Commission’s Web site. With Democratic nominee Joe Sestak rebuilding his coffers after a competitive primary and Toomey having been on the air for months, it’s the first time a Democratic Party organization has stepped in to fill the hole.

Even before the DSCC formally unveiled the ad, Toomey’s campaign was already pushing back, noting that the derivatives claim had been previously debunked.

The ad also claims Toomey “wrote the law to weaken oversight of Wall Street,” referring to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed Glass-Steagall financial regulations for the first time since the Great Depression. Toomey did acknowledge in his own congressional bio that he helped “craft” the legislation, but he didn’t cosponsor it.

He did vote in favor of it, along with a vast majority of Democrats. President Bill Clinton also supported it at the time, and has continued to voice support for it. Economists are divided about what role it played in bringing on the recession.

Going after Toomey for the Glass-Steagall repeal has been a cornerstone of Sestak’s campaign, but the bipartisan support the legislation enjoyed at the time makes it a trickier rallying cry. Democrats with whom Sestak has campaigned, including former Congressman Joe Hoeffel, voted for the bill.