Get ready for a long roller-coaster ride in the Massachusetts Senate — with the first poll in just over a month now showing Elizabeth Warren leading in the race.
The new numbers from Public Policy Polling (D): Warren 46%, Brown 41%. The survey of registered voters was conducted from March 16-18, and has a ±3.2% margin of error.
“Scott Brown’s still strong with independents, but not nearly as strong as he was in 2010,” writes PPP president Dean Debnam. “Elizabeth Warren’s doing 20 points better with those voters than Martha Coakley did, and that’s why she has a small early lead in this race.”
The TPM Poll Average currently shows Brown still ahead, based on earlier polling from February that had him in the lead:
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.
Recently, Brown had shown a resurgence in the polls, overcoming an earlier strong rollout by Warren. But don’t be surprised if the polls swing back to Warren for a while — and then maybe back to Brown, and perhaps a few more go-arounds.
