Former White House financial reform adviser Elizabeth Warren entered the Massachusetts Senate race to much fanfare late last year, quickly forcing her would-be rivals out of the Democratic primary, and giving incumbent Senator Scott Brown (R) reason to sweat.
But the first few months of the campaign have given way to poll numbers that suggest this race will still be one of the key ones to watch in 2012 — and that Brown does indeed have a good shot at re-election.
Brown was elected to the Senate in a special election in January 2010, following the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy, in a stunning upset against Democratic state Attorney General Martha Coakley. However, his challenge in 2012 remains that he is a Republican senator in a deep-blue state, which is expected to vote Democratic by a wide margin in the presidential race — for example, a recent Rasmussen poll gave Obama a 55%-38% lead over the state’s former Governor Mitt Romney. So Brown will need a lot of ticket-splitters.
Soon after her campaign rollout, Warren caught up to Brown in early polls, and then overtook with a lead in the fall. But going into the new year, Brown has since overtaken Warren and leads in the polls once again — such as a 9-point lead in a Suffolk poll, and a 5-point lead with Rasmussen.
The graph below tells the story:
When asked about the state of the race, the Brown campaign directed our attention to a strategy memo they publicly released last week, which touted Brown as a successful moderate — and also cast Warren as on the losing end of the Obama administration contraception insurance mandate. Key quote:
Since the beginning of the year, Scott Brown has solidified his strong appeal and standing in the race for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. His focus on jobs, and favorable coverage of bipartisan legislation bearing his name, have combined to reinforce the positive impression that Massachusetts voters have of him. Meanwhile, his likely Democratic opponent, Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren, who entered the race as the self-described “intellectual founder” of the Occupy protest movement, has struggled with a message that has veered from the politics of class struggle to, more recently, social and gender issues.
Meanwhile, a Democratic source in Massachusetts considers all of this early back and forth to be a regular part of the campaign cycle.
“Candidates generally get a little bump with a launch, especially one that was as successful as she did. She got tons of media coverage — that was before Karl Rove’s group chimed in with a flight of negative ads against her. but right now the polls are right where we expect them to be. Scott Brown is an incumbent, he as tons money, he’s personally well-liked, and at this point we would expect him to be ahead.”
The source was referring to ads by the groups Crossroads GPS, in which Rove has been a key player. The group’s various waves of ads against Warren have alternately called her the “Matriarch of Mayhem” of the Occupy Wall Street protests — and also of being too friendly to the banks and generous with the bailouts!
The source also brushed off a report by the Boston Globe that some Democrats could be getting jitters: “Anyone who knows what Governor Patrick’s numbers looked like at this point in 2010, and saw the amazing work the grassroots operation did to re-elect him after that, knows that Massachusetts Democrats are not going to get jitters at this point.”
