Today’s poll is from MassINC, and it shows Elizabeth Warren leading Scott Brown 43%-41%, with 12% undecided. Although it was released today, the poll was actually conducted April 25-28. The story about Warren’s Native American heritage first hit the front page (and many of the inside pages as well) of the Herald on Friday, April 27, so about half of the poll’s respondents might have been aware of it. The Herald’s story had no apparent effect (the same pollster had Warren up 3 (46-43) three months ago), which is consistent with Rasmussen’s result earlier this week.
The fav/unfav numbers for Brown are 46/33, and for Warren 34/25. Interestingly, Deval Patrick remains more popular than Scott Brown, as his fav/unfav is 53/37. Brown’s name recognition remains better than Warren’s, as you would expect at this point in the race: 8% of respondents had never heard of him, while 17% had never heard of Warren; furthermore, 13% had heard of but offered no fav/unfav opinion for Brown, while 23% selected that option for Warren.
Another key datapoint from the crosstabs: Brown leads Warren by only 10 points among independent voters (46-36), with 13% undecided. That is not going to be enough – to win, he needs to rack up 2010-like numbers where he wins indies by something like 30 points.
MassINC broke this poll down by religious affiliation; if you’re interested, those details are written up here.
seascraper says
Wow after reading this site every couple days, I would have thought she’d be up by double digits.
Donald Green says
We’re working on it. Care to help?
Mark L. Bail says
mouth, pick up your marbles, and go over to Red Mass Group if you want people to think “Indiangate” is anything more than a politically transparent attempt to make a non-issue an issue. You want some Brownie love, you’ll find it there.
Over there, you can read Rob Eno tell EdFactor that Indiangate matters because it goes to “character.”
Over there, you can read what Patrick really feels:
You’ll find some delightful quotes from Townhall and Breitbart there too. You don’t have to bring your best game to BMG, but at least bring a game.
Ryan says
Which front-page posts have given that idea?
Mark L. Bail says
down the front page. Way down.
whosmindingdemint says
they are amping those tweakers at the august Pioneer Institute, reassuring us that The right honorable Dan the idea man Winslow is getting to the bottom of the gambling comisssion pick and, oh my, “Indiangate” – clever.
bostonshepherd says
Using the crosstabs to determine how many in the sample of 423 of party identified voters would vote for Brown if the election were held today, I calculate 43.8% to Warren’s 41.3%, with 10.8% undecided (4.1% in 3 other categories.)
Assuming all the D and R undecideds vote their party, the race is a virtual tie. It all depends upon the Undecided Independents. Brown would need to capture 53% to win per my calcs. Far cry from your 30 points.
Besides, didn’t Brown gather 73% of the Indie vote in 2010’s special election? And if 21% of self-identified Dems prefer Brown today, Warren has her work cut out.
November is a long way off, but if the election were held today, and indies split 60/40, Brown would win by 1%.
David says
is that Brown up 10 among indies isn’t enough. You could be right that 20 would do it, though I don’t believe for a second that, come November, more than 20% of registered Dems will vote for Brown, so take that number with a big grain of salt.
bostonshepherd says
By my calcs, 3 or 4% is sufficient. Yes, this assumes today’s 24% of Dem Brown voters, but still, as measured RIGHT NOW, the whole race is really a 50/50 proposition, slight edge to the incumbent because of name recognition.
I might change my thinking on Indiangate. Where it would have the most impact is on the ambivalent indie fence-sitter. If the race boils down to how the last minute voter breaks, I think the Native American issue might end up hurting Warren on the margins. The bulk of R and D voters don’t care, but maybe the crucial, middle 5% do.
David says
that Brown can win with only a 3-4% edge among independents? If so, you’re the only one in the state who thinks so.
Bob Neer says
Bless him.
danfromwaltham says
Recent poll has Obama up 20 pts over Mitt, yet Warren and Brown are tied? Is Brown such a good senator and Warren a poor candidate? Why is this race even close? Should not Warren be pulling 50% if Obama is getting 56% in MA? Why the ticket splitting?
If by some chance in November that polls show Mitt going to win his election, does that help or hurt Warren? And vice/versa if polls show Obama on his way to re-election?
David says
Scott Brown never in a million years thought he’d be tied with a first-time candidate six months out.
David says
yes, it’s good for Warren. Every poll that shows her tied (or close to it) is a poll that shows how vulnerable Scott Brown is. And the more that message gets hammered home, the better for Warren, and the worse for him. It was never supposed to be this way.
bostonshepherd says
In a state where an inexperienced JoeK3 will likely cruise to a House seat Scott Brown is the natural choice? In a state that usually has a 100% Democrat congressional delegation?
As a Brown supporter, I always felt his special election win was more an aberration than a shift in the political center of gravity (with an assist from Coakley.)
David says
convinced themselves that Brown was the next Bill Weld – a Republican who could remain popular, and win, and win big, in Massachusetts. The fact that he’s now fighting for his political life doesn’t jibe with that narrative, which has the optimists near panic. However, since you claim not to be one of those optimists, perhaps you are more sanguine about the whole thing. 🙂
nopolitician says
Scott Brown is an excellent politician. I don’t mean that in the sense that he is good for the state, nor does he represent my views, but he is an excellent campaigner, and he knows what to do to remain popular.
The recent Native American flap is a perfect example. He is getting every drop of juice from that non-issue. Warren isn’t handling it well. Brown is also using it to provide cover for his ridiculous vote against student loan rates. He is going to the well again and again over this.
Brown’s flaw is that he doesn’t know where to stop. Note how he continues to use the “professor Warren” moniker. That one is way past its expiration date, but Brown doesn’t have that kind of tact. Warren has to turn that into a weakness for Brown. She tried deflecting the Brown attacks with her own attack on the basketball shot, but Brown somehow managed to tell the press “hey, stop focusing on that riduculous issue and put your attention back on the ridiculous issue that helps me!” And it worked.
Warren needs to point out how Brown is going hard negative and make Brown look bad for dwelling on this. She then needs to go back to the issues that voters care about, namely the economy. She needs to repeatedly point out that tax cuts for the wealthy are not going to help the average voter. She needs to go after Brown’s support of the predatory banks. That will raise her image. If she can do it while making Brown look like a jerk, all the better.
merrimackguy says
in marketing as well as politics, when the well informed person is sick of it, the general public is just starting to hear it.
Which is why Brown will continue to work the Native American issue. Note how people got busy and unearthed the TX & PA records.
By Labor Day their will be some body of negative information about Warren (I predict the next play will be about the quality of her research) and at that point previously uninformed people will begin using it to form an impression of Warren.
It’s just smart politics on the part of the Brown campaign.
petr says
… I’m sure you can find something in that woodpile…
karenc says
It has never been in question. The fact that Harvard worked so hard to get her is based on that work – work they knew because she had been a visiting professor.
I really do not think you should go there. It might lead to people questioning Brown’s quality – of say Senate floor speeches, where he often verges on incoherence – even though he is READING a speech. Or they might look at how often his line of questioning is picked up by others at Senate hearings. Never in the few I watched.
whosmindingdemint says
rather than arguing the issues sounds like the Brown crowd has decided he is going to lose, you realie that, right, merrimack?
merrimackguy says
and the longer it lasts the more that it will be an issue in November.
The question is whether Harvard possibily offered a Rutgers Law grad (the only non-top ten law school graduate on the faculty) a tenured position because they thought she was a Native American (to help solve their protest problem), and whether she identified herself as one without having any clear evidence that she was actually of Native American descent.
Voters get this kind of simple stuff, rather than convoluted votes in Congress.
I don’t have anything more to say on this really. I’ll let people like Joan Vennochi make the case.
PS Karen her research tas been the subject of some criticism. Students apparently love her though (not like any professor is really measured on that however).
Bob Neer says
Brown has a 3-1 money advantage and the incumbency and was the most popular politician in Massachusetts just a few months ago. Now he is reduced to sending out faked clips of himself shooting baskets underhand and dancing around waving his arms in glee, and devoted partisans like our beloved Merrimack are three deep in the BMG comment threads hoping against hope that running against an “Indian” will be Brown’s magic ticket. Look, the guy can’t even keep it up in the polls. He’s already screwed up worse than almost anyone could have imagined six months ago. He’s getting desperate.
David says
but you’re making sh!t up. You say that “the question is” whether Harvard took Warren’s heritage into account when they offered her tenure. All the available evidence is that they did not, as I have demonstrated, and others have as well. Furthermore, the Globe has now demonstrated that Warren did not rely on her heritage in applying to college or law school, nor, apparently, in obtaining her first teaching job. In fact, the only evidence of her describing herself as “minority” is her self-listing in the AALS directory once she was already a professor.
So, you’ve got nothing. Unless you have some evidence that I’m overlooking – and please, do let me know if that’s the case.
Mark L. Bail says
into nowhere. This story was all smoke created make people think there must be fire.
The fire isn’t there. First it was supposed to be minority status that got her into law school and earned her a job at Harvard. Because a person who went to law school at Rutgers could never make it to the hallowed halls of America’s premier university. Now it’s supposed to have earned her tenure. Seriously, you guys want this story to be true because it would validate all your biases.
Now the Associated Press writes:
It does look like law schools may have taken advantage of her heritage, but she’s clean. There’s no fire. ABC is reporting that “Elizabeth Warren Did Not List as Minority on Law School Application, Was Touted as One by U. Penn.”
whosmindingdemint says
Killed this story. Though Mr. Bierman did his level best to breathe new life into this stale tale with a lot of criss-crossing innuendo and obfuscation of what Warren did and didn’t do with what the Univerties did – its dead. Doesn’t mean it won’t get replayed on the wingnut news networks ad infinitum.
merrimackguy says
I guess I assumed that top law school would tend to hire people from other top law schools. Apparently they actually hire nobodies from low ranked law schools.
Harvard, a school sensitive to protests, has law students demanding that the university hire more minorities, women, and minority women. They happen to have someone who is identified as a minority woman (as identified by a law directory)) sitting there as a visting professor and she gets hired. They trumpet her as a minority and even report her to the EEOC as one.
But you’re right, nothing there, I’ll move along.
SomervilleTom says
Look, we already have first-hand on-the-record statements from Charles Fried — who recruited and hired Elizabeth Warren — that he hadn’t even read the directory.
This comment is an example of absolute and counter-factual drivel. It exemplifies a posture “rooted in bias and misinformation”. The only audience that is likely to be receptive to this rubbish is an audience that is “stupid, clueless, rascist, and mean spirited”.
When you post garbage like this, you should expect the appropriately contemptuous responses that happen in a reality-based community — this why your whining is so unconvincing.
David says
(a) You obviously have no idea how hiring works at law schools.
(b) If Harvard Law was taking into account Warren’s heritage when they offered her tenure, they would have trumpeted it from the rooftops, given the intensity of the debate of minority women on the faculty at that time. Yet I have demonstrated that they indisputably did not do so. They *did not* “trumpet her as a minority” until at least a year after she was offered tenure.
(c) You obviously want the facts to be different from what they actually are. Please try to stick to reality on this site. If you want to indulge in fantasy, other places are available.
merrimackguy says
even the 1/32 is now suspect. It could very well be zero.
Does that make a difference, or is “believing you have Native American blood” enough to qualify you?
But no sense getting to the bottom of a non-story, especially one that is not positive for your candidate.
Mark L. Bail says
that it doesn’t matter to us. You’re looking at it through the lens of the right’s ideology. We’re not. It’s not just partisanship.
Blame Harvard, but as hard as the Brown campaign tries, it’s not running for office.
Unlike Mitt’s bully pulpit or Brown’s clueless vote supporting Mitt’s bully veto, it doesn’t fit a pattern that illuminates Warren’s character.
David says
“Qualify you” for what? As has been demonstrated ad nauseam, Warren did not benefit from her heritage either in applying to schools as a student, or in getting jobs as a law teacher. Please try to keep up with the class.
whosmindingdemint says
getting to the bottom of claiming to be a victim, but not doing anything about it; deluding yourself into believing you actually are bi-partisan; closing a million dollar book deal and increasing your wealth threefold in your first year in the senate because you’re a “regular guy”, claiming to have quit drinking on New Years after a reporter says she was drinking with you in April; covering your kid under your insurance while you campaign on repealing the very legislation that made it possible; voting for an amendment that would allow employers to decide what coverage they will and will not allow their employees and then saying an eployees recourse is to sue; blaming trial lawyers for everything while a member of the bar; being so full of yourself that you can’t wait to brag about seeing pictures of dead a guy because it makes you feel heroic and the beat goes on merrimack.