Poll: Sen. Brown posts lead on Warren in Mass. Senate race

The poll, conducted by the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the Boston Herald, gives Brown a six-percentage-point lead over Warren, with 50 percent support to her 44 percent support among registered voters. Coming after four straight polls in which Warren posted a lead, however, further polling will need to show Brown in the lead before he can safely say Warren’s surge is waning.

{mosads}The new poll, however, marks an eight-percentage-point boost in support for Brown since the last poll, taken in early December, and a five-percentage-point loss for Warren, possibly indicating the campaign has taken a negative toll on the Democrat.

Warren’s difficulty, according to this poll, is twofold: Not only does she get a lower percentage of Democratic support than Brown has Republican support, but she also lags substantially with independent voters, which must be a concern for a Democrat running in a state where over 50 percent of voters are unaffiliated with a party.

Warren takes only 65 percent of Democrats, while Brown takes a full 83 percent of voters in his party. And he leads Warren by 19 points among independent voters.

However, Warren could still convince some Brown supporters to back her — 15 percent of those who said they’d be voting for Brown said they could change their minds between now and Election Day, and only eight percent of Warren supporters said the same of her. A full 31 percent of Massachusetts registered voters polled said they could be persuaded to switch candidates.

That underscores the importance of the four debates scheduled in the Senate race, the first of which is Thursday night. Those debates will give Massachusetts voters, known for paying atypically high attention to the state’s politics, the chance to compare the candidates side-by side.

The poll was conducted among 524 registered voters from Sept. 13-17, and has a margin of error of 5.3 percentage points.