The front-runner in a four-way race for the Republican Party’s blessing is still a long way from capturing the two-thirds majority needed, with most of the informal straw polls taken.
And the lack of an overwhelming consensus raises the possibility of an ugly, protracted battle at the county GOP convention being held in less than two weeks.
In the most recent poll, Brubaker won seven of 15 votes cast by rank-and-file committee members in the 43rd Legislative District, in the Lampeter-Strasburg area.
Brubaker has won more votes than any of the other three candidates, but his total remains at far less than half — 40 percent, to be exact — of the informal polls among GOP members in Wenger’s Senate district.
Chet Beiler, a Manheim-area businessman and former party chairman, also won seven votes — a strong showing that moved him into a tie for second place.
Sharing that position is Rapho Township farmer, supervisor and bank executive Lowell Fry. He fared poorly in the latest round of informal polls, getting only one vote.
Both Beiler and Fry now have won 29 percent of the votes taken.
East Hempfield Township supervisor Heidi Wheaton, recruited by anti-incumbent group PACleanSweep, didn’t get any votes Wednesday night. She holds only 2 percent of the votes overall.
Rapho Township Supervisor Jere Swarr, a Fry supporter who attended the meeting, said Beiler and Brubaker are benefiting from making contact with committee members early on.
They were the first two candidates to announce campaigns for Wenger’s 36th Senatorial District seat.
“Lowell came out late. Both Chet and Mike, they had been working there aggressively,” Swarr said. “I think most of the votes were predetermined and Lowell couldn’t flip any. I don’t know why it happened, but I’m obviously disappointed.”
Straw polls are being conducted by committee people in each of the county’s eight state House districts through Feb. 11. They are designed to test the strength of candidates prior to the Republican County Convention.
Seven of those districts are partly or wholly within the 36th Senatorial District. In all, 173 committee people live in Wenger’s Senate district, and 104 are members of the committees that have met so far.
Future polls among committee people in the 36th district will be conducted Tuesday in Rep. Tom Creighton’s 37th District, and a week from today in Rep. Gordon Denlinger’s 99th District.
The convention is being held Feb. 15 and 16 and Willow Valley Resort and Conference Center.
The winner of the May 16 Republican primary will face Democrat Jason Leisey in the November election. He is a 25-year-old Army National Guardsman from Mountville who expects to earn a medical discharge after being injured in Iraq last year.
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