Republican Scott Brown, who won the Massachusetts Senate seat long held by Democrat Edward M. Kennedy, is trailing Jeanne Shaheen in a U.S. Senate race in neighboring New Hampshire, according to a poll released on Thursday.
A Boston Herald/Suffolk University poll of 800 likely New Hampshire voters in the November election found 49 percent support for Democrat Shaheen with 39 percent supporting Brown. That is a slightly narrower lead than Shaheen, a former governor of the state, held in earlier polls.
Brown carried a strong lead heading into the September Republican primary, with the support of 40 percent of likely primary voters polled from Sunday to Wednesday, well ahead of second-place Bob Smith, who had 12 percent support.
Brown is the kind of uber-moderate Republican we are always told is the only kind that can win in the northeast. From my perch on the other end of the country I can’t figure out if he is just not as dynamic as he seemed to be when he won the special election in Massachusetts or if the northeast is lurching ever-leftward. Maybe it’s a bit of both.
He might be in a stronger position at this point if he’d been back in New Hampshire for a longer period of time before making a Senate run. Circumstances, however, didn’t allow him that luxury.
There is still a lot of time left. At the rate things are unraveling for the Democrats in general he may be able to close that gap.
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