National cash fuels TV ads, shapes Pennsylvania Senate race

(AP) — A staggering amount of money is flooding into Pennsylvania's race for U.S. Senate, bringing TV ads on abortion, guns and Iran into living rooms with barely 11 weeks until the election.

In one ad by billionaire Michael Bloomberg's group, the daughter of the principal slain in the 2012 mass shooting in Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School says she is grateful for Toomey's willingness to defy GOP leaders on legislation to expand gun background checks.

After running successfully as a fiscal hawk in 2010's huge Republican midterm wave election, Toomey's re-election campaign kicked off by touting his efforts to work across the aisle, including on gun control, a strategy aimed at winning over Pennsylvania's large swing bloc of independent voters, conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans.

[...] Toomey ranks as among Pennsylvania's three most conservative members of Congress, according to American Conservative Union ratings, and in recent months he has increasingly followed a national Republican playbook on national security and law-and-order issues.

McGinty isn't running from Toomey on national security issues; rather, she returns the criticism, for instance for opposing Democrats' budget legislation that carried more aid for community policing programs.

[...] while Republicans say they always expected the race would tighten as the Nov. 8 election approached, McGinty argued that Toomey's focus on security issues belies a poor voting record on middle-class priorities, and the disappearance of Toomey's polling lead shows that voters are recognizing that.