By Greg Giroux, CQ Staff

Republican strategists are eying their prospects to recapture a number of the 30 House seats that the Democrats wrested from them in the 2006 elections — with Pennsylvania’s normally GOP-leaning 10th District getting an especially intent stare. Republican primary voters on Tuesday will choose between two wealthy businessmen for their nomination to take on Democratic freshman Christopher Carney , whom party officials argue would never have won the seat two years ago had a sex scandal not undone Republican incumbent Don Sherwood.

Chris Hackett, the owner of an employee placement firm, and Dan Meuser, whose company distributes home medical equipment to seniors and people with disabilities, have been waging an expensive and often hard-hitting campaign in the 10th, which takes in mostly Republican and rural precincts in the northeastern part of Pennsylvania.

There isn’t a whole lot of daylight on policy issues between the two men, who have expressed support for social issue and fiscal conservatism. In addition, both men oppose a timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. They both have denounced illegal immigration, though both have acknowledged that they had at some point employed people who had entered the country illegally.

Hackett’s backers say he has taken a harder line than Meuser against so-called earmarks, the narrowly tailored appropriations projects that detractors say often have dubious value. The Club for Growth PAC, a conservative organization that backs candidates who support cuts in taxes and federal spending, is supporting Hackett. The group has aired a television ad that describes Meuser as “just another politician” and alleges that “we can’t afford Dan Meuser.”

Meuser has defended his views, saying he supports a more transparent process for allocating federal funds. He says he would end anonymous earmarks and force each appropriations project to be subject to an up or down vote. He backs a constitutional amendment mandating a balanced budget.

Democratic strategists have pointed to the negative tone of the Hackett-Meuser campaign and hope that it will redound to the benefit of Carney.

Both Republican candidates are personally wealthy and have invested substantial sums of their own money in their campaigns. A $50,000 contribution from Hackett on April 15 brought to $792,300 his total personal donations to his campaign treasury. Meuser has given his campaign even more cash — exceeding $1.5 million, according to his most recent campaign reports.

Carney, who is unopposed in the Democratic primary, is seeking a second term in a district that was long represented by Republicans. The latest of these was Sherwood, who was given such a strongly Republican constituency in the redistricting early this decade that the Democrats did not even field a candidate in 2002 and 2004.

But Sherwood’s career quickly unraveled after he acknowledged an extramarital affair, though he denied the woman’s claims that he had physically abused her. Facing a credible Democratic candidate in Carney, a political science professor and former Pentagon counterterrorism consultant, Sherwood also had to fend with President Bush’s rising unpopularity, even in a district where Bush had won 60 percent of the vote two years earlier. Carney won the two-man contest with 53 percent of the vote.

CQ Politics currently rates this November’s general election contest in the 10th District as Leans Democratic.