Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) led Elizabeth Warren (D) by 8 points in a new poll released today.
A survey by the Western New England University Polling Institute found 49 percent of registered Massachusetts voters would cast their ballot for Brown if the election were held today, while 41 percent would vote for Warren, a Harvard professor and the presumptive Democratic nominee. Ten percent were undecided.
The poll, taken Feb. 23 through Thursday, matches two other February polls that showed Brown leading Warren in a horse-race matchup.
Brown’s job approval rating among registered voters remains relatively high. Fifty-four percent of those surveyed approved of the way he was handling his job, while 28 percent disapproved. Nineteen percent said they didn’t know.
Forty-seven percent had a favorable opinion of Brown, while 28 percent had an unfavorable opinion of him. Five percent of those surveyed hadn’t heard of him and 16 percent had no opinion.
Thirty-seven percent had a favorable opinion of Warren, while 20 percent had an unfavorable opinion of her. Seventeen percent of those surveyed hadn’t heard of her and 19 percent had no opinion.
“We’ll let the political pundits debate the polls and watch them go up and down over the course of this campaign,” Warren spokeswoman Alethea Harney said in a statement. “Elizabeth will keep working her heart out to talk to the people of Massachusetts about what she’ll do as their US Senator to help middle class families get ahead.”
The poll released today, conducted in partnership with the Springfield Republican newspaper and MassLive.com, used live telephone interviewers to poll 527 registered Bay State voters. The margin of error in the survey, which used random digit dialing to call both landlines and cell phones, was 4.3 points.
Trained student interviewers, as opposed to professionals, were used to conduct the poll.
