Public Policy Polling

Brown-Warren matchup likely, MA GOP wants Romney

Raleigh, N.C. – Two days after PPP showed Elizabeth Warren the first and only candidate to post a lead over Sen. Scott Brown, new primary numbers show she may soon clear most of the field on the way to the Democratic nomination to challenge Brown.  Warren earns the support of 55% of Bay State Democratic primary voters, far ahead of Alan Khazei’s 9%, Tom Conroy’s 7%, Marisa DeFranco’s and Bob Massie’s 2%, and Setti Warren’s and Herb Robinson’s 1%.  22% are undecided.  58-81% have not heard of the other contenders, versus only 31% of Warren, so some ground could be made up if they can up their name identification.  But that will be hard with the national money and political support and even much of the grassroots backing Warren.

Warren, Romney up big in Massachusetts

After only a few days in the race Elizabeth Warren's already built a 46 point lead in the Massachusetts Democratic Senate primary.  She's at 55% to 9% for Alan Khazei, 7% for Tom Conroy, 2% each for Marisa DeFranco and Bob Massie, and 1% each for Herb Robinson and Setti Warren.

What's most notable about Warren's huge early advantage is that it's coming from across the ideological spectrum of the Democratic electorate.  She does have her greatest strength with voters describing themselves as 'very liberal'- a 55 point lead over Khazei at 65-10- or 'somewhat liberal'- a 53 point advantage over Khazei at 62-9.  But she's got a huge advantage with moderates- 36 points over Conroy at 46-10- and with those primary voters describing themselves as 'somewhat conservative'- 22 points over Khazei at 40-18- as well.  Her support is not just a liberal phenomenon.

Elizabeth Warren leads Scott Brown by two points

Raleigh, N.C. – Democrats looking for a savior may have found one in Elizabeth Warren.  She debuts in the Massachusetts Senate race as the first candidate PPP has found with a lead against freshman Senator Scott Brown over the course of three polls.  Warren has seriously upped her name recognition and favorability with voters, but the main driver behind her gain is Brown’s own sinking popularity.

Once one of the most popular senators in the country, a Republican in a blue state, it would have taken a nosedive in public favor for Brown to be beaten.  And that is exactly what has happened.  Early last December, when PPP first looked at the race, 53% approved and only 29% disapproved of his job performance.  That fell to 48-36 in June.  Only three months later, he sits at 44-45, moving him in only nine months from the 16^th to the 61^st most popular of 87 senators on which PPP has polled.  Brown has only become more popular with the GOP, but they are only 15% of voters.  The 45% independent plurality gives him only a 49-39 mark, versus 61-25 in December.  And the 40% who are Democrats have moved from 35-41 to 31-52 to 25-65, still pretty good for cross-aisle appeal, but clearly on the wrong trajectory.

Warren takes lead on Brown

Elizabeth Warren has had an incredibly successful launch to her Senate campaign and actually leads Scott Brown now by a 46-44 margin, erasing what was a 15 point deficit the last time we polled the state in early June.

Warren's gone from 38% name recognition to 62% over the last three months and she's made a good first impression on pretty much everyone who's developed an opinion about her during that period of time.  What was a 21/17 favorability rating in June is now 40/22- in other words she's increased the voters with a positive opinion of her by 19% while her negatives have risen only 5%.

The surprising movement toward Warren has a lot to do with her but it also has a lot to do with Scott Brown.  We now find a slight plurality of voters in the state disapproving of him- 45%, compared to only 44% approving.  We have seen a steady decline in Brown's numbers over the last 9 months.  In early December his approval was a +24 spread at 53/29.  By June it had declined to a +12 spread at a 48/36.  And now it's continued that fall to its current place.

Massachusetts Republican Numbers

-Scott Brown doesn't need to worry about a Tea Party challenge. 70% of Massachusetts Republican primary voters think that he is ideologically 'about right' while only 23% think that he's too liberal. Only 25% say they would support a more conservative alternative in a primary against Brown to 65% who say they'd stick with him.

Brown gets lumped in with Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins a lot but he's doing a much better job than them of staying in good standing with the party base. Democrats aren't going to get lucky next year by facing some far right person who wins a primary challenge- if they want the seat back they're going to have to find a way to beat Brown himself.

-Mitt Romney has a wide lead for the Presidential nomination in the state with 49% to 10% for Michele Bachmann, 9% for Sarah Palin, 8% for Herman Cain, 6% for Tim Pawlenty, 5% for Ron Paul, 4% for Newt Gingrich, and 1% for Jon Huntsman.

It's unremarkable that Romney is ahead in his home state, but it's worth noting that his level of support is greater with Massachusetts Republicans than any of his opponents find in their backyards. Here's how they stack up:

Candidate (State)	Home State Primary Support
Mitt Romney (MA)	49%
Tim Pawlenty (MN)	33%
Newt Gingrich (GA)	22%
Herman Cain (GA)	16%
Sarah Palin (AK)	15%
Michele Bachmann (MN)	14%
Gary Johnson (NM)	13%
Rick Santorum (PA)	11%
Ron Paul (TX)	10%
Rick Perry (TX)	9%

Romney's favorability with Republicans in Massachusetts is 78/14, indicating that his health care plan isn't too much of a liability at least with primary voters on the home front. He puts up very strong numbers across the ideological spectrum.

Full results here

Romney dominates in Massachusetts, Brown safe in primary

Raleigh, N.C. – While Mitt Romney’s national lead in the Republican presidential primary is far from overwhelming, he achieves a landslide at home. In Massachusetts, Romney garners nearly five times the support of his nearest competitor, with 49% of the vote to 10% for Michele Bachmann, 9% for Sarah Palin, 8% for Herman Cain, 6% for Tim Pawlenty, 5% for Ron Paul, 4% for Newt Gingrich, and just 1% for Jon Huntsman.

Romney’s base lies with moderate Republicans, where he pulls 55% of the vote. However, Romney also runs strong with even very conservative Republicans, where Romney still enjoys a large 40% plurality of the vote.

Scott Brown retains popularity, leads Dems by at least nine

Raleigh, N.C. – Scott Brown’s election over Martha Coakley was a harbinger of things to come for Democrats in 2010, but he did not ride into town on the Tea Party Express.  There are too few conservatives (27%) and Republicans (15%) in Massachusetts for that to have succeeded, even in a special election.  Instead, because more than 45% of Massachusetts voters are Democrats and another 40% independents, Brown won and has remained popular because he has cultivated an image as a moderate, as someone far more mainstream than a typical Republican.  So he leads the full gamut of potential Democratic challengers for a full term by at least nine points—Coakley, 49-40; Rep. Mike Capuano, 48-38; Rep. Ed Markey, 47-37; Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, 47-32; entrepreneur Alan Khazei, 50-31; TV host Rachel Maddow, 49-29; activist Bob Massie, 48-25; and Newton Mayor Setti Warren, 48-23.

48% of Bay State voters approve of Brown’s job performance, including 31% of Democrats and 58% of independents.  36% disapprove.  Half see Brown’s views as “about right,” something only 27% say about the GOP as a whole.  A third of Democrats and 61% of independents see his ideology as acceptable, while only 11% of Democrats and 31% of independents say that about Brown’s party.

Brown continues to do well

There's good news and bad news for Democratic hopes of taking down Scott Brown in our newest Massachusetts poll. The good news is that Brown's approval numbers are starting to decline. What was a +24 approval spread in December at 53/29 has now been cut in half to +12 at 48/36. The bad news is that with no standout Democratic candidates ready to make the race yet Brown leads 8 hypothetical opponents we tested against him by anywhere from 9 to 25 points.

Brown's approval numbers are down because he is starting to lose a little bit of his shine with Democratic voters. On our last poll he came close to breaking even with them at 35% approving to 41% who disapproved. Now it's 31% approving to 52% who disapprove. His popular standing with Republicans (74/15) and independents (58/25) is basically unchanged.

The key to Brown's ability to win a full term is going to be his continuing to make voters feel like he's different from the rest of the Republicans. And he's still succeeding on that front. 54% of Massachusetts voters think the GOP in general is too conservative. But only 33% express that sentiment about Brown. Most notably only 21% of independents feel that Brown himself is too far right while 47% say they consider that to be the case for his party as a whole. It has not been a great 5 months in the polls for Congressional Republicans but Brown is still differentiating himself from his peers.

The Democrat who performs best against Brown is last year's losing nominee, Martha Coakley. She trails by 9 points at 49-40, a performance slightly worse than her 5 point margin of defeat last year. A pair of the state's Congressmen have similar deficits with Mike Capuano down 10 at 48-38 and Ed Markey down by 10 as well at 47-37.

No one else comes within 15 points of Brown. Elizabeth Warren trails by that margin at 47-32, Alan Khazei is down 19 at 50-31, Rachel Maddow who we tested just out of curiosity has a 20 point deficit at 49-29, Bob Massie is behind by 23 at 48-25, and Setti Warren does the worst with a 25 point gap between him and Brown at 48-23.

These numbers are not quite as bad for Democrats as they look. Let's look at the Elizabeth Warren case for example. Only 38% of voters know her well enough to have formed an opinion about her and when she's matched up against Brown 27% of Democrats are undecided compared to only 3% of Republicans. She has much more room to grow.

The trend of low name recognition for the potential Democratic candidates and Republicans being completely lined up behind Brown while high numbers of Democratic voters are undecided persists in all of the match ups we tested. That doesn't mean someone will catch up to Brown eventually, but it does mean this will get closer as the Democratic candidates really get out there and campaign and become better known to voters in the state. For now though it looks like Brown is continuing to do a good job of navigating the tough road of a Republican Senator representing a blue state.

Full results here

5 polls that surprised us the most

As the year comes to a close I thought it might be interesting to relive the five polls we did that surprised me the most over the course of what was an election cycle full of surprises:

5) Arkansas Senate Poll, January 29th-31st. If you'd asked me at this time last year I would have told you I thought Arkansas would be among the 2 or 3 states we polled most often in 2010. Blanche Lincoln had horrible approval numbers throughout the last part of 2009 but she also had a weak Republican candidate field going against her so even though she was trailing in a lot of polling it wasn't by insurmountable margins and it seemed like she might be able to make a comeback once the health care issue that was killing her was in the rear view mirror. Then John Boozman started showing interest in the race and we were first out of the gate in polling that match up. I figured Lincoln would be in a lot of trouble, down 10 or so. She was down by 23! We never polled the race again the rest of the year and it never changed much from that initial benchmark. She lost by 21.

4) Kentucky Republican Senate Primary Poll, December 18th-21st 2009. In retrospect this poll was one of the biggest early signs that it was going to be a very rough cycle for establishment Republicans. It seems hard to believe after blowout victories in both the primary and general elections but for most of 2009 national political observers saw Rand Paul's Senate campaign as an amusing sidebar, giving its viability little credence with the Republican regulars in the state lined up behind Trey Grayson. Then we polled it and not only did we find Grayson trailing- we found Grayson trailing by 19 points! Whatever happened over the last half of 2009 to put Grayson so far behind he never recovered from- every single independent poll for the whole rest of the campaign found him down by double digits.

3) Florida Republican Senate Primary Poll, March 5th-8th. It was already abundantly clear that Charlie Crist was in deep, deep trouble before we took our first stab at the race- a Rasmussen poll the month before had shown him down by 18 points. But it was still pretty shocking to find him down by 32 points at 60-28. It took about five minutes for the Crist campaign to get out a release attacking the poll as 'agenda driven' and designed to help the Rubio campaign. The Florida Times-Union was so shocked that they commissioned their own snap poll on the race...and found Crist down by 34. At that point it started to be seen as only a matter of time before Crist threw in the towel on being the Republican nominee and he did late the next month.

2) Delaware Republican Senate Primary Poll, September 11th-12th. We did a Delaware Senate poll in mid-August and didn't even bother taking a look at the primary race. That's how far fetched the thought of Mike Castle losing the primary was at that point. After Joe Miller's shocking victory in the Alaska Senate GOP contest we decided we would do a Delaware primary poll the weekend before the election just to cover our bases. Still, when even the Tea Party Express' own polling leaked the week before the election showed O'Donnell behind we didn't expect to see much. But after starting the poll Saturday morning of that weekend, it was clear by the middle of Saturday afternoon that at worst the race was 50/50 and that it was more likely O'Donnell was ahead. She was up 3 when we tallied it up and I was probably more nervous for the 48 hours between releasing that poll and the election results coming in than I was at any other point in the cycle because the result was so surprising and there was no other polling company backing us up. If we were wrong there wasn't going to be anyone to break our fall. But fortunately we weren't- it really seemed possible at the time that 30,000 Republicans in Delaware were going to cost their party control of the Senate although Democrats winning most of the toss up races kept that from being the case in the end.

1) Massachusetts Senate Poll, January 7th-9th. The final week of 2009 we had a vote on where we should do our first poll of 2010 and Massachusetts was one of the options. It finished third behind Connecticut and Alabama. That's how off the radar Scott Brown's chances were just two and a half weeks before the special election. Then Rasmussen came out with a poll showing Brown behind by only 9 that got people paying attention, but still it's not too often that someone manages to go from a 9 point lead to losing in a two week span, especially if it's not a primary. So we polled it mostly just to confirm the new conventional wisdom that Democrats needed to not take it for granted, but that they didn't have that much to worry about. I remember we started the poll up during the BCS Championship game and it was clear by about halftime that Democrats had a whole lot more to worry about in Massachusetts than just about anyone realized. When we put the poll out Saturday night Brown was up by 1 and his momentum carried on to a 5 point victory over the final week.

It's been a great year for PPP, thanks to everyone for their support and Happy New Year!

Senate Approval Ratings

During the second half of 2010 PPP polled on approval ratings for 59 different Senators. Here's some of the information on how they stack up:

-The average approval rating for a Senator right now is 43% approving to 40% disapproving. That suggests the old adage that voters hate Congress but love their Congressman holds true...to an extent...maybe hate Congress but don't mind their Congressman is a better way of putting it. At any rate 37 Senators had positive approval numbers in our most recent polls while 22 had negative ones.

-There's very little difference in the average approval of Republican Senators vs. Democratic Senators. Your average GOP Senator has a 43/37 approval spread. Your average Democrats comes down at 44% approval and 41% disapproval.

-Seven Senators posted a net approval rating of +20 or greater during the second half of 2010. The most popular is Amy Klobuchar at +30, followed by Scott Brown at +24, Judd Gregg at +23, and then Barbara Mikulski, Mark Warner, Chuck Schumer, and Olympia Snowe all at +22.

-There are only three Senators who posted a net approval rating of -20 or worse during the second half of 2010. They are Roland Burris at -39, Arlen Specter at -31, and Joe Lieberman at -21. Specter and Lieberman's numbers definitely speak to the perils of having it both ways...they don't really make Democrats or Republicans particularly happy and you can get away with that if independents love you for your independence but in their cases that has not happened. I will be interested to see if Lieberman's numbers are back in the right direction after the last month and I imagine we'll poll there sometime in January.

-The two most popular Senate delegations are Maine where Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins add up to a +39 approval spread and Maryland where Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin combine for a +36 approval spread. The two least popular are Connecticut where Lieberman and Chris Dodd are both pretty unpopular and add up to -37 and Illinois where Dick Durbin actually is on positive ground but Burris is so unpopular that together they add up to -37.

Here are the full numbers, there are probably a lot of other interesting points that I'm missing. And a methodological note, I'm using our most recent poll here except for states that we polled repeatedly in October- for those ones I'm using the poll that proved to come closest to the election outcome in the state:

Senator	Approval	Spread
Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)	59/29	+30
Scott Brown (R-MA)	53/29	+24
Judd Gregg (R-NH)	52/29	+23
Olympia Snowe (R-ME)	56/34	+22
Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)	54/32	+22
Mark Warner (D-VA)	54/32	+22
Chuck Schumer (D-NY)	57/35	+22
Susan Collins (R-ME)	53/36	+17
Jeff Bingaman (D-NM)	50/34	+16
John Cornyn (R-TX)	46/31	+15
Herb Kohl (D-WI)	50/35	+15
Ben Cardin (D-MD)	42/28	+14
Daniel Akaka (D-HI)	49/35	+14
Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)	50/37	+13
David Vitter (R-LA)	53/41	+12
Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX)	45/33	+12
Tom Udall (D-NM)	48/36	+12
Jon Tester (D-MT)	50/40	+10
Kit Bond (R-MO)	45/36	+9
Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)	49/40	+9
Tom Carper (D-DE)	45/36	+9
Jon Kyl (R-AZ)	47/39	+8
Russ Feingold (D-WI)	50/43	+7
Carl Levin (D-MI)	47/40	+7
John Kerry (D-MA)	50/43	+7
Jim Webb (D-VA)	43/37	+6
Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)	42/37	+5
Ted Kaufman (D-DE)	38/33	+5
Sherrod Brown (D-OH)	40/37	+3
Bill Nelson (D-FL)	36/33	+3
Al Franken (D-MN)	45/42	+3
Maria Cantwell (D-WA)	44/41	+3
Mark Udall (D-CO)	38/35	+3
Richard Burr (R-NC)	36/34	+2
Jeff Merkley (D-OR)	35/33	+2
Dick Durbin (D-IL)	47/45	+2
Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)	41/40	+1
Patty Murray (D-WA)	47/48	-1
Claire McCaskill (D-MO)	43/44	-1
Mitch McConnell (R-KY)	42/44	-2
Barbara Boxer (D-CA)	44/46	-2
Bob Casey (D-PA)	36/40	-4
George Voinovich (R-OH)	36/40	-4
Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)	41/46	-5
Carte Goodwin (D-WV)	17/22	-5
Kay Hagan (D-NC)	36/43	-7
John Ensign (R-NV)	41/48	-7
Harry Reid (D-NV)	44/52	-8
Michael Bennet (D-CO)	39/47	-8
Mark Begich (D-AK)	39/47	-8
George LeMieux (R-FL)	16/27	-11
Mary Landrieu (D-LA)	41/53	-12
Jim Bunning (R-KY)	32/45	-13
Max Baucus (D-MT)	38/53	-15
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)	37/53	-16
Chris Dodd (D-CT)	36/52	-16
Joe Lieberman (I-CT)	33/54	-21
Arlen Specter (D-PA)	29/60	-31
Roland Burris (D-IL)	19/58	-39