A new Suffolk University poll has Senator Scott Brown (R-Good Timing) in a statistical dead heat with challenger Elizabeth Warren, 48/47, in the race for Teddy K's old Senate seat.
The numbers show Warren gaining on Brown (she was down by nine points two months ago) despite a recent controversy over Warren's having listed herself as 1/7,000,000 Cherokee on certain college and job applications, potentially benefiting from affirmative action. PoliticOlogy didn't cover this, because it's possibly the most minute scandal in history, but many thought it could take the winds of out Warren's barely Native American sails.
Alas, it turns out that voters either don't know or don't care about the scandal. A plurality believe that Warren is telling the truth, but a majority don't give a fig one way or the other. (Chris Cillizza makes a good point: the Brown/Warren gentlemen's agreement against negative ads means Warren dodged a huge, Super PAC-funded bullet here.)
The voter indifference to candidate's conceptions of each other cuts both ways. Only 33% of respondents agreed that a vote for Brown is a vote for Wall Street, a testament to what a smart politician Brown has turned out to be. Upon his unlikely election, Brown quickly realized that for all he was elected in a tea party tidal wave, he represented a blue state and needed to pick his battles. Brown has voted with his party only 54% of the time, and his votes for ending DADT and passing Dodd-Frank make it difficult for Warren to sell him as an extreme Republican (though his Dodd-Frank vote is less than meets the eye).
But the real story here may be slightly buried in the poll. Obama trounces Romney 59/34 in Massachusetts, one of the 29 states Romney claims as his home. A 25% deficit is woeful in a state a candidate governed, and word has it that Romney is not even bothering to campaign in Massachusetts.
That's bad news for Brown. Brown's 2010 election, even under the most generous descriptions, was a fluke. He benefited from an off-cycle election, with huge tea party momentum and a curiously lackluster opponent. None of those factors come into play in 2012, when Brown will not only be facing Warren, one of the Democrats' rising stars, but also scores of voters coming out to vote for Obama.
Here's the back-of-the-napkin electoral math. 3,000,000 votes were cast in MA in 2008. If the same number were cast today, Obama would get 1.77 million to Romney's 1.02 million, and Brown's 1.44 million. This already assumes that 420,000 voters will vote for Obama and then switch parties and vote for Brown, which is in the political spectrum of extremely unlikely. Even still, Brown would need to convert another 80,000 voters from Obama's camp to get to 1.5 million and beat Warren. That's a tall, tall order in an election year, especially if Brown has no support from Romney.
Long story short: a statistical tie means victory goes to Warren.
[Note: Scott Brown is trying to stay the hell away from Romney, fearing the latter's conservative primary positions will be attached to him, which the DNC is more than happy to do. But the above theory is more about turnout and party allegiance than specific voter issues.]
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