Joe Sestak’s “shut up” strategy seems not to be a winner with Pennsylvania voters:

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in the state shows Toomey with 45% support, while Sestak earns 38% of the vote. Six percent (6%) prefer some other candidate in the race, and 12% are undecided.

Last month, Toomey held a near-identical 45% to 39% lead.

In fact, except for a brief surge after his mid-May victory over incumbent Arlen Specter in the state’s Democratic Senate Primary, support for Sestak has remained in the 36% to 40% range in matchups with Toomey back to February. In those same surveys, Toomey has received 42% to 47% of the vote.

Sestak’s  main problem is that he has been passive and virtually invisible. What voters know about him is what third-party groups and the Toomey campaign have told them: he nearly always votes in lock-step with the Pelosi-Reid-Obama agenda (97.8 percent of the time, to be precise); he was tangled up in (and maybe exaggerated his involvement in) Jobsgate; he is as pro-Israel as J Street is (i.e., in name only); and he doesn’t want the voters to know about his Israel or anti-business voting record, and certainly not what is in his Navy records. He is probably fortunate to be only seven points back.