A top Republican senator who once dismissed former Rep. Pat Toomey's chances of winning the Pennsylvania Senate race will host a fundraiser for him in late November.

After Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., announced last April that he was switching parties to run for re-election as a Democrat, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, publicly rebuffed Toomey's chances of winning the Senate seat.

"I don't think there is anybody in the world who believes he can get elected senator there," Hatch was quoted as saying on April 29.

Now Hatch is scheduled to headline a high-dollar fundraising lunch on Nov. 17 "in support of" Toomey, according to a copy of the event invitation.

"Our campaign has worked hard and succeeded in persuading a great many people of Pat Toomey's prospects in this race, and now every public poll proves it," said Toomey campaign spokeswoman Nachama Soloveichik. "Pat is very pleased to have Sen. Hatch's support and looks forward to working with him throughout the campaign and serving with him in the Senate."

Specter said he was changing parties because he could not defeat Toomey in the GOP primary.

CQ Politics currently rates the race Leans Democratic.

One of the hard things to explain to casual consumers of political news is the sometimes thin connection between philosophy and party. Not all Democrats consider themselves liberal, not all Republicans consider themselves conservative and vice versa.

The latest example of how not all conservatives march in step with the Republican Party comes from the blog RedState, which is leading a fundraising drive for four conservative Senate candidates, two of whom are running in GOP primaries against opponents backed by the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

"I won't call this the 'screw the NRSC' fundraiser, but I'm sorely tempted," wrote editor-in-chief Erick Erickson.

When all the receitpts are counted, organizers are hoping they'll have $2.5 million from Tuesday night's Philadelphia fund-raiser that used the commander-in-chief as fundraiser-in-chief.

President Obama was the drawing card for the event designed to raise money for Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter's 2010 campaign and other Senate Democrats.

Specter, who changed parties this spring, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee are splitting the proceeds.

"Arlen is not someone who came to Washington to fight for a particular ideology. He came to fight for the working men and women of Pennsylvania. And he has a long and successful record of doing just that," Obama said, according to a transcript that was released by the White House press office.

Coaxing Arlen Specter into switching parties and running for re-election as a Democrat was a major coup for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is bending the Senate's schedule to accommodate a presidential fundraiser for Specter Tuesday afternoon in Pennsylvania.

Reid announced Friday that the Senate would hold no votes after 3 p.m. Tuesday. His office later said that the scheduling decision was meant to accommodate a long-planned fundraiser that President Obama is headlining in Philadelphia to benefit Specter's campaign.

The move could delay efforts to finish work on the fiscal 2010 transportation spending bill, which the Senate began considering Thursday.

Two candidates who want to unseat Sen. Arlen Specter debated health insurance and then went out for a beer. Specter wasn't invited - either to the debate or to the Allentown Brew Works afterward.

During the town-hall style forum at Muhlenberg College in Allentown,his two major challengers, Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak and Republican Pat Toomey, agreed on little more than defeating Specter.

Sestak had invited Toomey, a former congressman, to debate the issue and left Specter out, according to Toomey's campaign. Neither of them mentioned the senator once during the civil, 95-minute event. Specter, who's seeking a sixth term in 2010 (and his first as a Democrat), issued a one-sentence statement shortly after the debate ended Wednesday night. "I look forward to returning to the Capitol next week and speaking to my colleagues about trying to pass a health care reform bill," he said.

Turns out Arlen Specter and Joe Sestak weren't the only Senate candidates in Pennsylvania who spoke to ideological bloggers Friday in Pittsburgh.

Pat Toomey, the Republican former representative who is likely to face the winner of the Specter-Sestak Democratic primary, did the same.

Except Toomey's audience on Friday night was a group of conservative bloggers who convened in the Steel City for the second annual RightOnline conference, sponsored by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation.

Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Sestak isn't fazed by going up against Sen. Arlen Specter, who leads in fundraising and in the polls and has the support of Democratic establishment figures.

Speaking with reporters on a conference call Tuesday afternoon, a few hours after he made his Democratic primary challenge of Specter official, Sestak said that his political situation today isn't unlike 2006, when he defeated veteran Republican Rep. Curt Weldon in the 7th District.

"I love being the underdog," Sestak said. "A lot of room to grow. Seventy percent of the people don't know me enough to make a decision, and I'm going to give them that opportunity."

If you needed confirmation that the 2010 Senate race will be a big-spending affair, it came in announcements this week from the campaigns of Democratic incumbent Arlen Specter, primary challenger Joe Sestak and likely Republican nominee Pat Toomey.

Specter's campaign said Tuesday that it raised $1.73 million in the second quarter of this year -- a three-month period that straddled Specter's late April announcement that he was switching his party affiliation from Republican to Democratic. He has $7.5 million left to spend.

Sestak, the congressman from Pennsylvania's 7th District, said on Monday that he raised $1 million in the second quarter and has $4.2 million left to spend. Though Sestak has neither officially announced his candidacy not set up a Senate campaign account, he is permitted to use the funds in his House campaign account for a Senate race.

This is no gentlemanly disagreement.

Pennsylvania's 2010 primary is still far off, but Sen. Arlen Specter and Rep. Joe Sestak are fully engaged in jockeying for advantage in their Democratic primary.

Specter on Thursday blasted Sestak as a "flagrant hypocrite" for questioning the senator's bona fides in the Democratic Party, which Specter joined in late April after 28 years in the Senate as a moderate-to-liberal Republican. Sestak has called himself a "true Democrat" and suggested Specter is not.

In a statement released by his campaign, Specter said that Sestak, a retired admiral who was first elected to the House in 2006, didn't formally affiliate with the Democratic Party until he became a candidate for office and also didn't vote in many elections.

Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter is proving to be a loyal Democrat.

Specter, who faces a serious challenge in a 2010 Democratic primary, has demonstrated a higher level of party unity during his brief time as a Democrat than he did as a Republican.

CQ data show that Specter, since bolting the Republican Party at the end of April, has sided with Democrats on 17 of 20 votes that have pitted most Democrats against most Republicans. CQ refers to these party-line or near-party-line votes as "party unity" votes.

It's an admittedly small sample -- the Senate voted just 51 times between April 30, when Specter's party switch became official on the voting rolls, and the July Fourth recess, and just 21 of those votes were party unity votes. But Specter's 85 percent party unity score post-switch demonstrates a large degree of party allegiance for the senator.

Arlen Specter has won the backing of Joe Torsella, who until recently had been vying with Specter for the Democratic Senate nomination.

In a statement released Tuesday morning by Specter's campaign, Torsella described Specter as a "hard working, effective and honest fighter for Pennsylvania in the United States Senate."

Torsella, the former deputy mayor of Philadelphia who later headed the city's National Constitution Center, and Specter have some personal history. Specter once hired Torsella's wife to be a counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee when Specter was the panel's chairman.

When Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter switched parties two months ago, he said he would issue contribution refunds "upon request."

Now the Club for Growth, the conservative political group that is a longtime Specter foe, wants to help any disgruntled Republican donors take now-Democrat Specter up on his offer.

The Club is asking the Federal Election Commission (FEC) if it can send a letter or make a telephone call to Specter's donors informing them that they can ask his campaign for a contribution refund.

One Republican from Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley is backing another.

Rep. Charlie Dent, who is in his third term representing the 15th District in and around Allentown and Bethlehem, is backing the Senate candidacy of his House predecessor Pat Toomey, who also represented the district for three terms (1999-2005).

Endorsements from individual lawmakers rarely influence votes. And it's not as if Dent was going out on a limb in endorsing Toomey over his much lesser-known primary opponent, Peg Luksik, after Republican Sen. Arlen Specter said last month that he was switching parties.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge said Thursday that he will not seek the 2010 Republican nomination for the Senate seat held by Arlen Specter, the five-term incumbent who switched last week from the GOP to the Democrats.

Ridge -- the state's chief executive from 1995 to 2001 and the founding secretary of the federal Department of Homeland Security -- said in a statement that he decided against a Senate bid "after careful consideration and many conversations with friends and family and the leadership of my party."

"I am enormously grateful for the confidence my party expressed in me, the encouragement and kindness of my fellow citizens in Pennsylvania and the valuable counsel I received from so many of my party colleagues," Ridge said. "The 2010 race has significant implications for my party, and that required thoughtful reflection. All of the above made my decision a difficult and deeply personal conclusion to reach."

Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey -- a conservative activist, former House member and political nemesis of longtime Sen. Arlen Specter -- has been showing some serious political muscle since he launched a 2010 Senate bid less than three weeks ago. His campaign said Tuesday that he has raised more than half a million dollars over the 20 days since he announced his candidacy.

The money news came exactly a week after five-term Republican moderate Specter made his bombshell announcement that he was switching to the Democratic Party. Specter made the move to avoid a rematch of the 2004 Senate primary in which the Specter barely staved off an upset by Toomey, and was prompted by polls showing Toomey holding a big lead over the incumbent among the strongly conservative-leaning GOP primary voting base.

But the tout about the surge of early campaign funds also came amid simmering speculation that Toomey might soon draw yet another big-name primary opponent from the state Republican establishment: Tom Ridge, a former two-term governor.