It must be somewhat galling for the conservative Boston Herald to report these kind of numbers for their boy Scott Brown. There's little good news here to spin for Brown as his approval rating continues to fall.
Democrat Elizabeth Warren has opened up a lead against Republican incumbent Scott Brown for the first time in their U.S. Senate showdown, but a barrage of attack ads appears to have damaged Warren and Brown’s standing among Massachusetts voters, a new University of Massachusetts at Lowell/Boston Herald poll shows.
Warren leads Brown by a 49-42 percent margin, outside the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 5.3 percentage points. That number includes voters who say they are "leaning" for either candidate. But even without the "leaners," Warren still leads by a 46-41 percent margin, barely within the margin of error.
The poll of 505 registered Massachusetts voters was conducted for UMass-Lowell by Princeton Survey Research from Dec. 1 - Dec. 6, and shows Warren with her largest lead yet in the campaign. A UMass-Lowell/Boston Herald poll taken in late September showed Brown ahead by a 41-38 percent margin, so the new poll represents a 10-point swing in Warren’s favor in less than two months.
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The new poll results are bound to send more shockwaves across the country, where Democrats and Republicans are closely watching to see whether the Harvard Law professor can knock off one of the GOP’s rising stars. The Massachusetts race could determine the balance of power in the U.S. Senate and Democrats are making the race one of their top priorities.
Poll Link (pdf file)