Right fights: in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, conservative voters need to get serious.

THE most important election this year is the presidential election. A strong case can be made that the second most important election is the one that will occur on April 27, when Pennsylvania Republicans will decide whom to nominate for the U.S. Senate: the incumbent senator, Arlen Specter, or the conservative challenger, Congressman Pat Toomey. For conservatives who generally support President Bush but are concerned about the Republican party's drift under his stewardship, the Specter-Toomey race, and a handful of other primary elections, offer the opportunity to make a midcourse correction.

This is important for conservatives, because we are in the middle of one of our seasons of discontent. Conservatives are always tempted, in such moments, to throw up our hands in disgust. Here and there one hears calls for conservatives to sit out the November elections. The question that the Pennsylvania campaign--and a few others--raise is whether conservatives are prepared to do something constructive about their dissatisfaction.

There are two theories that underlie the sit-it-out strategy. The first is that there's no difference between the Republican and Democratic candidates, and it will make no difference who wins. The second is that the Bush Republicans need to be taught a lesson about what happens when they drift from conservative principles. The trouble with the first theory is that it is false. A conservative who cannot see this in the middle of a controversial war, a conflagration over marriage and the courts, and bitter debates about taxes may be beyond persuasion. The parties are further apart from each other than they were in 2000 or 1992, and a change in the balance of power between them will have consequences on many issues.

The second theory is risky. It may be true in some circumstances that conservatives can pull the Republican party, and the political center of gravity, their way by not voting or, better, by voting for a conservative or libertarian third party. But in at least as many cases, the message sent would be perverse: that conservatives are too implacable to allow politicians to appeal simultaneously to them and to centrists. The lesson would then be that there is no right-of-center political platform capable of attaining an electoral plurality.

These theories have an appeal that goes beyond their merit: They rationalize political laziness as the highest form of principle. The alternative response to dissatisfaction with the status quo, in the country and in the Republican party, involves work. It is not to decrease conservative activism in behalf of less-than-ideal candidates, but to increase conservative activism for better ones. Too many conservatives have gotten into the bad habit of acting as though all it takes to pull the center rightward is to publish op-eds and issue press releases complaining about the Bush administration. The press is more than happy to provide publicity on such occasions: "Bush's Base Bolts," p. A1. Criticism of Bush is often deserved, and often useful. But electing more true conservatives to Congress would be better.

THE CASE FOR TOOMEY

Which brings us back to Toomey's race against Specter. If you are a conservative upset about the Republican establishment's big spending and accommodationism--especially if you're upset enough to be thinking about boycotting Bush's re-election--there is no excuse not to be supporting Toomey. Specter has moved a little bit to the right for the primary season, but he remains, as my colleague John J. Miller put it six months ago, the worst Republican senator. He is enthusiastic about spending: Citizens Against Government Waste gives him an anemic 51 percent rating. He supports the labor-union agenda, taxpayer funding of abortion, cloning, and quotas. He usually opposes tort reform, although on a few occasions it has been possible to drag him into supporting it.

When the Senate was debating a bill to make sure that American soldiers could not be hauled before the International Criminal Court, he was the only Republican senator to vote against it. (John Kerry voted for it.) He's an opponent of school choice, calling it unconstitutional and expressing the hope that the Supreme Court will come around to this view. His latest cause is settling the asbestos-litigation mess by putting taxpayers on the hook for the bills. The prospect of Specter's becoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee, as he is in line to do if he gets re-elected, makes conservative Senate staffers toss and turn at night. They know that Chairman Specter will no longer have to worry about offending Pennsylvania conservatives. This will be his last term; he will be 80 by the time of the next election.

Toomey, on the other hand, is a "taxpayer superhero," according to Citizens Against Government Waste. He's a supply-side tax-cutter. His primary interest in serving in Congress has been to shrink the size and scope of the federal government. He is a strong advocate of a private-account option for Social Security. He is also, within the limits of his congressional district--a heavily Democratic steel town--a free trader (far more so than Specter). Toomey is a strong ally of social conservatives, supporting bans on cloning and abortion, and the Federal Marriage Amendment. He has voted against amnesties for illegal immigrants.

Taking down an incumbent senator in a primary is hard. The White House and Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania's other Republican senator, have made Toomey's race harder by coming out strong for Specter. Santorum and his colleagues have endorsed Specter in part because he is already part of the club. But there's another reason for the endorsements, a reason that may sway some conservative voters, too. The only half-good justification for a conservative to support Specter over Toomey is that Specter would have a better chance than Toomey of keeping the seat Republican in November. With Republicans holding only 51 seats in the Senate, the majority is (supposedly) at stake.

But that argument has a number of holes. First, Toomey would have a good shot at winning the general election. He has won over Democrats before, in his district. His ideological profile--pro-private accounts, pro-life--is close to that of Santorum, who won re-election comfortably in 2000. Santorum, indeed, ran six points ahead of Bush. Second, it is not clear that having nominal control of the Senate matters that much in terms of legislative accomplishment. The Senate is not like the House, where electing a 218th member, even a lousy one, spells the difference between the passage of conservative and liberal bills. Third, Republicans are almost certainly going to keep the Senate even if they lose Specter's seat. The worst case is that Republicans lose a seat in Illinois, gain a seat in Georgia, and win at least two of the races in Oklahoma, Louisiana, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina. That would leave them up one. If they lose Pennsylvania, too, they will be right back where they started, at 51. Well, not quite: They will be a more conservative caucus, and one whose most liberal members know that they can go only so far before they run the risk of losing a primary.

OPPORTUNITIES ABOUNDING

The Pennsylvania Senate race is the starkest liberal-conservative match-up in a Republican primary anywhere in the country this year. But there are some other Senate races where conservatives have a stake in the outcome. In Georgia, two conservatives--congressman Mac Collins and businessman Herman Cain--are running against congressman Johnny Isakson, who is more socially liberal. They're all trying to fill the seat that Democrat Zell Miller is giving up. Everyone thinks that the winner of the Republican nomination is likely to win the general election, so the question here is who would be the best senator. Conservatives need not worry that splitting their vote between Collins and Cain will give Isakson the nomination. As long as they can hold Isakson below 50 percent, there will be a run-off. The first round is July 20.

Kirk Humphreys, the mayor of Oklahoma City, has gotten the support of the entire Republican establishment in his state. He is a moderate conservative who can spout both conservative boilerplate and nonpartisan boilerplate. (His bottom line on Social Security: "We must take the best and the brightest ideas--regardless of party affiliation--and meld them into a solution that allows the federal government to meet its obligation without overly burdening a new generation.") Former congressman Tom Coburn, who is planning to disrupt the coronation, is, on the other hand, one of the most activist conservatives ever to have served in the House. He regularly gave his party's leadership heartburn, for all the right reasons. As a senator, he would be something like Jesse Helms and Phil Gramm rolled into one. The Republican winner will be running against Brad Carson, a smart, conservative Democratic congressman. Coburn might be the stronger candidate against him. It's a generally Republican state. Since Coburn used to hold Carson's seat, he would be able to contest the Democrat's geographic base. The primary is July 27.

In Illinois, the most attractive and popular candidate, Jack Ryan, is running to the right of his major opponents. He is a sort of Jack Kemp Republican, one who spends much of his time explaining how his ideas--principally school choice--will help the poorest of the poor. The general election is going to be an uphill climb, however, in a state that has been going heavily Democratic in presidential campaigns. The primary is on March 16. In South Carolina, conservatives are guaranteed to have one of their own as the Senate nominee to replace Fritz Hollings, a Democrat who's retiring. Jim DeMint stands out as the only free-trader in the race. He is also the only innovative, policy-oriented candidate. DeMint, like Toomey, has been a leader on Social Security. If he loses the June 8 primary to former governor David Beasley, the message to Republicans in the state will be: Stay away from free trade.

The House Republican primary races offer few choices between conservatives and liberals. In the third district of Kansas, my home district, conservative Kris Kobach is running against moderate Adam Taff. Taff is a decent candidate for the district and came close to knocking off the Democratic incumbent, Dennis Moore, in 2002. Taff is fairly conservative as party moderates go. While he favors legal abortion, for example, he also favors private accounts for Social Security. Kobach, on the other hand, is a smart conservative across the board. The national party establishment was surprised when Taff beat its candidate in the 2002 primary. Now it's making the opposite mistake of backing Taff. The Republican party in Kansas is badly factionalized, but Kobach would stand a better chance of healing it--if he can run a more grassroots campaign and stop stressing his Washington credentials (such as having worked with John Ashcroft on homeland security). The primary is August 3.

Two Texas races pit activist conservatives against don't-rock-the-boat conservatives. Arlene Wohlgemuth was willing to stand up to her party and chop the state budget as a state legislator. She's facing off against Dot Snyder, a more establishmentarian type. In another district, Bill Lester, with the backing of the free-market Club for Growth Political Action Committee, is running against Mike Conaway, the former head of the local Chamber of Commerce. Those races take place on March 9.

Two liberal Republican congressmen, Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland and Sherry Boehlert of New York, are facing challenges. It will be difficult to beat either one. But David Walrath came from nowhere to nearly defeat Boehlert in 2002, and he might be able to pull off an upset on September 14.

SENDING A MESSAGE

In many of these cases, and especially in Pennsylvania, the conservative candidate has to fend off defeatism. The conventional wisdom is that Specter, for example, can't be beaten. But heeding the conventional wisdom can be costly. In 2000 in New Jersey, everyone wrote off Scott Garrett's challenge to liberal Republican congresswoman Marge Roukema. He made the race a squeaker--and if conservatives had known he would do that well, they would have probably been able to turn the race. In 2002, everyone knew that Democrat Janet Napolitano was going to beat conservative Republican Matt Salmon in the Arizona gubernatorial campaign. That race ended up being so tight that it wasn't called until the weekend after the election. If the national Republican party or conservative activists had known the race would be that close--if they had not given up prematurely--they could have won it. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but conservatives could well feel the same way if Specter wins by a point.

Stephen Moore, head of the Club for Growth, says, "If Toomey can pull off this upset, it's going to be a rating of 10 on the Richter scale in terms of the political earthquake it would create. It would be a way for conservatives to express their frustration with the direction the Republican party has gone, especially on big-government issues. Specter, on the Appropriations Committee, is the symbol of the waste and excesses in Washington."

A Specter victory will send a message, too. If he wins, Republicans from the president on down will have an answer to the question of how seriously they should take conservative complaints about the party establishment's willingness to support ever-higher spending. The answer will be: not very.