In Pennsylvania’s bellwether county, Democrats play up the “fear factor.” Matt Kaminski reports:

Democrats are reluctant to run on health care and hard-pressed to run on the economic record. A couple of Democrats I spoke to last Thursday at a Bucks County party dinner, which featured Messrs. [Joe] Sestak and [Patrick] Murphy, said they have to inject social issues into the campaign. Mr. Sestak keeps hitting at Mr. Toomey’s “very rigid set of ideals . . . his different values—different than mainstream Pennsylvanians.”
Ed Rendell, Pennsylvania’s outgoing Democratic governor, calls it playing up the “fear factor.” “Mike Fitzpatrick may be a reasonable guy, but Michele Bachmann [the Minnesota Republican congresswoman] isn’t,” Mr. Rendell tells me. “Toomey’s a good candidate who doesn’t appear to be a wacko. But Toomey gets hurt every time Christine O’Donnell opens her mouth.”

It’s not working:

In the eighth congressional district, which covers all of Bucks County and slivers of Philadelphia and Montgomery County, Mr. Fitzpatrick is ahead by five points, according to a Monmouth University poll last week.
As Bucks goes, so does Pennsylvania. The county (pop. 665,860) is a microcosm of the state.