Bea Turner is angry, and she blames herself.

"All this was my fault as much as anyone. I wasn't minding the store. I wasn't paying attention," she said last Sunday, as fellow conservatives filed past her heading to the potluck buffet at a 9.12 Project meeting in a North Hills church.

Now she is paying attention -- to what she sees as the untrammeled growth of the federal government, a rush toward bailouts and deficits. Now, she says, she knows whom she's voting for. She's got a history of the United States on her Kindle. She teaches a course on the U.S. Constitution at the Cranberry Municipal Building.

Ms. Turner was born in 1933, "the year Franklin Roosevelt took us off the gold standard ..." she said. Retired from a varied career that included stints as a researcher for U.S. Steel and founding member of the Portersville EMS program in Butler County, she's involved in the Glenn Beck-inspired 9.12 Project and the Independence Caucus, a conservative effort to free politics from "big money."

"A lot of the discontent is coming now because people are upset with their parties," she said, adding that many of her Democratic friends share her anger, if not her views.

"We all have our axes to grind. Mine is restoring this country to a constitutional republic."

In a divisive, polarized political environment, anger and estrangement -- amplified by digital social networks and the 24/7 news cycle -- are common denominators.

The Tea Party movement that has attracted attention of conservatives such as Ms. Turner is a new and vocal example of that mood. But the fractious environment is not just a case of conservatives railing against a Democratic administration.

Republican divisions were on display last week as conservatives excoriated their recent poster boy, newly elected Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, for voting for a Democratic jobs bill. Without naming names, radio host Rush Limbaugh criticized his television counterpart, Mr. Beck, over his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference two weeks ago.

On the left, environmentalists bemoaned the Obama administration's embrace of nuclear power. And antiwar activists, once buoyed by candidate Obama's criticisms of the Iraq war, were dispirited by President Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

With the 2010 midterm elections looming, Republicans anticipate gains in Congress, perhaps even a return to control of the House. But across the country. incumbents of both parties are facing primary challenges from candidates united in the message that Washington is broken.

Pennsylvania will be a central stage for these angry plot lines over the next year. Sen. Arlen Specter's defense of his record incumbency will be one of the most watched and most expensive Senate races in the country as he fends off a primary challenge in his new party from Rep. Joe Sestak.

And if he's successful in May, he is likely to face the same Republican, Pat Toomey, who nearly ousted him in a Republican primary six years ago. Mr. Toomey is the favorite in this year's GOP nomination contest against Peg Luksik.

And perhaps no state will feature so many seriously contested House races. Democrats made big gains in the state's House delegation in the past two election cycles, picking up a total of five formerly Republican seats. Now Republicans are targeting all of them, along with the open seat in the 12th District held by the late John P. Murtha.

National polling reinforces the perception of a toxic political climate. But while the statistical measures of discontent are high, they are not unprecedented. Still, the levels of estrangement now approach those of years such as 2006 and 1994 -- midterm elections when massive losses by congressional incumbents led to reversals in control of the House.

Last month, the Washington Post/ABC news polls asked Americans whether they felt generally pro- or anti-incumbent toward public officials. Among the respondents, 48 percent described themselves as anti-incumbent and 35 percent said they were pro-incumbent. A few months before the 2006 elections, in which the Democrats won the House back from the GOP, the mood was slightly more pronounced, with 53 percent anti-incumbent, and 29 percent pro-incumbent.

Those numbers were almost the same in 1994, when Democrats lost control of the House for the first time in decades -- 54 percent anti-incumbent, and 29 percent pro-incumbent. The Post/ABC survey regularly asks voters to describe their attitudes toward the federal government.

Last month, two-thirds of the respondents said they had an unfavorable view, with nearly a third of that group choosing anger, as opposed to dissatisfaction, as the word that most closely described their view. In 1994, the numbers were similar -- 70 percent unfavorable overall, and 21 percent choosing angry.

The anti-incumbent surge, not surprisingly, has coincided with erosion in views of the Democrats. Last month, the poll found equal support -- 46 percent each -- for generic Democratic and Republican congressional candidates. Two years ago, Democratic candidates had a 51 percent to 46 percent advantage in the same poll.

But this relative gain in strength for the GOP does not translate to smooth sailing for all Republican incumbents. In Pennsylvania's 15th Congressional District in the Lehigh Valley, Republican Charlie Dent, a three-term incumbent, faces a challenge from a Tea Party-inspired candidate, Matthew Benol.

"We see the Republican Party as more our adversary than anyone," Mr. Benol said. "We're breaking the myth that they're the conservative group ... career politicians have gotten us into this mess. It's going to take citizen legislators to get us out."

In the adjacent 11th District, a Democratic incumbent is facing a primary challenge from a candidate, who, while having little in common with the Tea Party Republican, uses similar anti-incumbent rhetoric.

Rep. Paul Kanjorski, now the dean of the state congressional delegation with the death of Mr. Murtha earlier this month, is fending off an intra-party challenge from Corey O'Brien, a Lackawanna County commissioner.

"There's a mood in this country that's very strong in [the 11th District] that Washington has failed us," Mr. O'Brien said.

Mr. O'Brien said that national mood is reinforced among the voters he talks to by the prosecutions of legislators in Harrisburg, and locally, by revulsion at public corruption scandals in Luzerne and Lackawanna counties.

"Politicians have given them zero reason to believe," he said.

Recent polls of Pennsylvanians by Franklin & Marshall College have found similar levels of anger at incumbents.

"Not everybody who is angry is a Tea Party person, but there isn't any doubt that the movement is real, and politicians demean it at their peril," said Terry Madonna, the F&M political scientist who directs the survey. "...Twenty percent of Democrats are sympathetic to their goals."

Mr. Madonna pointed out that another strain of political anger fueled H. Ross Perot's significant showing in Pennsylvania in 1992, when he attracted more than 900,000 votes while President Bill Clinton captured the state with 2.2 million. Mr. Madonna noted that in the current climate, mainstream politicians in the state are doing their best to tap into the mood of discontent.

"Look at the gubernatorial election," he said. "In varying degrees, they're all running against Harrisburg, even though they're all public officials."

Similarly, he said, the U.S. Senate race in the state is populated with challengers trying to direct anti-incumbent sentiments against the veteran Mr. Specter.

""Look at [Rep. Joe] Sestak," Mr. Madonna said, referring to Mr. Specter's Democratic primary challenger. "You can see that he's trying to drive a more populist message --'got to fix Washington, it's broken.' "

Recent polls of attitudes toward Congress are unanimous in finding dismal views of the institution. That could be expected to translate to jeopardy for incumbents. But Alan I. Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist, suggested in a recent essay that views of Congress as a whole don't predict the outcome of congressional elections nearly as well as the approval ratings of the president.

In 1994, he pointed out, all of the defeated congressional incumbents were members of President Clinton's party, as in 2006 when all of the ousted incumbents, like President George W. Bush, were Republicans. Congressional handicappers study polling changes in the generic ballot and party self-identification, both areas where recent numbers have trended away from the Democrats.

While Mr. Obama will not be on the ballot in November, Dr. Abramowitz argues that the president's approval ratings are the more significant harbinger of the overall congressional results.

Mr. Obama's approval ratings have slipped significantly from the heights he -- like most new presidents -- enjoyed shortly after his inauguration. The Gallup survey has found that his approval rating in the past three months has been consistently between 48 percent and 51 percent, after averaging 57 percent through his first year in office.

That's clear erosion for a president who won so handily in 2008. But his current numbers are still above the second-year average approval ratings for other recent presidents. That includes Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, both of whom won landslide re-elections.

Mr. Reagan's second year average approval rating was 43 percent, while Mr. Clinton's was 46 percent. President George W. Bush, by contrast, enjoyed a 71 percent average approval rating in his second year, but that was in large measure a product of the rally-round-the-flag spirit that united the country in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Mr. Obama's overall approval rating is still reasonably healthy by historic standards, if not by the standards of his first weeks in office. But the Gallup survey has found that his ratings are the most polarized of any president in its statistical memory, with a 65-point gap between the approval ratings expressed by Democrats and Republicans.

In a recent essay, Gallup's Jeffrey M. Jones pointed out, however, that President George W. Bush's party disparity during his second term was still larger at 68 percent.

All of that raises the chicken-or-the-egg question of whether Mr. Obama and his predecessor were each a polarizing figure himself, or whether their ratings were a function of the fact that they presided over an already polarized electorate.

"A lot of Republicans are angry now; there were a lot of angry Democrats in 2006," Dr. Abramowitz said.

In the context of the 2010 congressional elections, however, Democratic candidates have to contend with emotion both hot and cold -- the anger of their opponents and the cooling of the ardor of their supporters.

A Franklin & Marshall survey in January found an "intensity gap" between Democrats and Republicans, as half of the registered Republicans are likely to vote in November while only 35 percent of Democrats said the same.

That reflects the turnout gap seen between Republican and Democratic areas in last November's appellate judicial elections in which Republicans won six of seven contested seats. It is also a sharp contrast from the 2008 presidential election in which the intensity gap favored Mr. Obama and the Democrats.

The party of the president traditionally suffers losses in the mid-term congressional elections. Dr. Abramowitz said that the fact that Democrats may be especially vulnerable to that trend this year is as much a reflection of their relative strength in the past two election cycles as it is of their potential weakness in this one.

"The Democrats picked up over 50 seats in 2006," he said. "A lot of those were in Republican leaning districts."

No state exemplifies that phenomenon more than Pennsylvania. Sen. John McCain carried five districts that simultaneously elected Democratic members of Congress. No other state had more than three similar splits.

Washington correspondent Daniel Malloy writes the "Pittsburgh On The Potomac" blog exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.