INSURGENT REPUBLICANS

This is not where Pat Toomey wanted to be tonight. The 43-year-old Pennsylvanian took over the Club for Growth in September 2006, after he lost a nail-biting primary to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and vacated his own seat in Congress. Against the objections of powerful Republicans, Toomey helped nudge Stephen Laffey, the conservative mayor of Cranston, Rhode Island, into a primary fight against Lincoln Chafee, the state’s liberal Republican senator. Throughout the summer, polls showed Laffey positioned to do what Toomey couldn’t: oust a pro-choice, pro-tax RINO (“Republican in Name Only”) and send the GOP establishment reeling.

But the plan isn’t coming together. As Toomey quietly eats a late dinner in a D.C. hotel, Andrew Roth, the Club for Growth’s government affairs director, feverishly refreshes the website collecting vote results. The first numbers come in, and Laffey is down 56 percent to 44 percent.

“Do we know where those numbers are from?” asks the club’s executive director, David Keating. “Are they from his precincts?”

“It looks bad everywhere,” Toomey says, putting down a cell phone and ...

LINK