Color us political

Welcome to the Primary Color blog. I’m writing from WHYY Election Central, where we’re waiting for the first results in the Pennsylvania primary to start rolling in.

We’re going live with wall-to-wall election coverage 8 on FM 90.9. And we’ll stick with you on the air until the last race is called and the final tear wiped away. All Things Considered local host Dave Heller will be manning the main mic, with Dave Davies, our senior political writer, sitting in to provide peerless punditry.

 

We’ve got reporters fanning our around the region to spend the evening with the ecstatic winners, and the glum losers.  Susan Phillips with be with Arlen Specter’s crowd at a Center City hotel, while Tom MacDonald has fired up the pickup to head out to Valley Forge Military Academy, where former admiral Joe Sestak will appropriately join his supporters to wait out what might be a long, tense night.

In the gubernatorial race, Lizz Fiedler will be at the Liacouras Center up at Temple, witnessing what will become of Anthony Williams’ surpassingly odd, well-funded, 11th-hour dash for the Democratic nomination.  Aaron Moselle gets what will probably be grim, short duty, where the embers of Joe Hoeffel’s hopes for the Dem nomination will be doused, appropriately, at the Spring Mill Fire Co. in Conshy.

Our sister stations to the west, WITF in Harrisburgh and WDUQ in Pittsburgh, will send over reports on gubernatorial front-runners Dan Onorato and Tom Corbett, both hanging in Pittsburgh.

Megan Pinto will be at the Warwick with old Philly political warhorse Jonathan Saidel, who’s got a good shot at getting the nod as the Dems lieutenant governor nominee.  (In Pa.’s odd system, lt. gov. candidates run independently in the primary, then the winner gets attached to the gubernatorial nominee’s hip, whether he/she wants that running mate or not.  cf. Ed Rendell and Catherine Baker Knoll.)

Also stopping by in the studio, or touching base via phone, will be political wise men Dick Polman of the American Debate blog and Terry Madonna of Franklin and Marshall, as will wise woman Lara Brown of Villanova, who is our person on the spot as the 12th District in Western Pa. elects a replacement for the late, fabled John Murtha.

Dick P., who does a great, great job on his blog, will let us know what’s at stake in other races around the nation today, with a test of Mitch McConnell’s clout in a Kentucky Senate race and Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln hanging on for dear life.

Will the Grim Reaper come for more incumbents tonight, as it did for Utah’s Bob Bennett a few weeks ago? Tune in and see, or check back on the blog.

We’ll hear from Zack Stalberg of the Commitee of 70 about turnout (lower than flea marker prices) and problems at the polls (some skullduggery with sample ballots in Philly, we hear.)

And since we’re public radio and we DO do issues, we’ll have chunky, interesting interviews on the two issues that likely will drive the mid-term election in the fall: health care and the economy.  David Grande, a physician and health care economist from HUP, will weigh in on health care, and Gus Faucher, a macroeconomist with Moody’s Economy.com (whose computer model nailed the 2008 presidential election, right down to the last electoral vote) will talk about how the job picture looks.

See you at 91-FM, or here at the Primary Color blog.