MA Senate Race: Experts Weigh In on Final Days

Saturday, November 03, 2012

Adam Joseph Drici, GoLocalWorcester Contributor

Heading into the final weekend before Election Day, political experts assessed the state of the highly-contested Massachusetts Senate race between Democratic hopeful Elizabeth Warren and Republican Senator Scott Brown.

Recent polls have returned somewhat mixed results. A Boston Globe survey of 583 likely voters conducted October 24 through 28 found Brown leading Warren by 2 points, 45 percent to 43 percent, with a 4.1 percent margin of error. But a poll conducted by the Suffolk University Political Research Center during the same period returned decidedly different results. Warren led Brown by 7 points, 53 percent to 46 percent, among the 600 likely voters surveyed, with a 4 percent margin of error. Four of the previous five polls in the Massachusetts Senate race found Warren ahead.

"Elizabeth Warren is riding a final wave of momentum to the U.S. Senate," said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk Political Research Center.

"Unless something drastically changes in the final days before the election, you will be hearing the title 'Senator-elect' Warren instead of 'Professor' Warren."

Darrell West, vice president and director of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, said the Democrat seems to have a slight edge going into the final weekend of the campaign.

"She has performed well in debates and presented an articulate vision for the future of the country," he said.

"She is benefitting fromr a slight movement towards Democrats in key states. President Obama's strong leadership during Hurricane Sandy has helped him regain votes and has boosted several Democratic Senatorial candidates around the country."

Donald Brand, professor and chair of the Political Science department at the College of the Holy Cross, said Brown is running as strongly as a Republican can in a heavily-Democratic state like Massachusetts. The Senator remains politically popular and likeable in general, while Warren's personal negatives are still rather high.

While a Brown victory is still very much in the cards, Brand said the edge goes to Warren at this point thanks to her campaigning on a message of retaining Democratic control of the Senate.

"Even though there are a lot of Massachusetts voters who like Scott Brown personally and who are attracted to his claims to have worked across the aisle, they nevertheless worry that Brown's election could be tilting the balance of power in the Senate to the Republicans," he said.

"It's going to be a matter of who turns out the vote and who has the best machine for getting the vote to the polls."

Robert Boatright, associate professor of Political Science at Clark University, said the Senate contest looks to be Warren's race to lose.

"Most polls show Warren in the lead, and there's no reason to think that the Brown campaign has a good enough ground game to overcome that," he said.

"The rule of thumb in Massachusetts seems to be that the Democratic ground game is worth a few points when it's put into action, which it certainly has been."

Boatright said that Brown may have made a mistake in passing on the last debate, a sentiment echoed by Brand, who noted that the final meeting could have provided an opportunity for Brown to make a comeback, similar to the way his debate performance in 2010 made him a viable candidate in the special election against Martha Coakley.

With both candidates already rolling out their ads to end on a positive note, Boatright said the only thing left for the two to do is rally voters for Tuesday.

"For Brown, this means convincing people that he can win, and for Warren, it means warning supporters not to be overconfident."