It wasn’t an accident that Sen. Scott Brown decided to steal a joke from Conan O’Brien to hit conservative extremist Rick Santorum.
During the opening monologue of his Feb. 27 show on TBS, O’Brien, a Massachusetts native, used the same double entendre: “As of tomorrow, Rick Santorum will be assigned Secret Service agents. Did you know that? Yeah, this is historic: It’s the first time Santorum has agreed to use any kind of protection.”
Public Policy Polling counts the reasons:
Warren is reclaiming the middle from Brown. We find her up 42-40 with moderate voters, a group that we found Brown leading Coakley 55-41 with. She’s also inspiring a lot of enthusiasm from young people. 56% rate her favorably to 27% with an unfavorable view, and she leads Brown 56-29 with them.
Warren’s name recognition is up to 79%, from 62% when we last polled the state in September. Her negatives are actually rising faster than her favorability number. She’s gone from a a 40/22 spread to 46/33. Democrats (66/15) are pretty enthusiastic about her but she’s not showing much crossover appeal, registering at 13/69 with Republicans. Independents are pretty evenly divided with 39% rating her favorably and 38% unfavorably.
Voters are more comfortable with Warren ideologically than they are with Brown. 51% say that her views are ‘about right,’ compared to 44% for the incumbent. She’s probably also benefiting from the fact that 54% of Massachusetts voters think the Republican Party is too conservative, compared to only 41% who think the Democratic Party is too liberal. Although only 35% of voters think Brown himself is too conservative, the bad image of his national party has to be rubbing off on him at least some.
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