BOSTON - Martha Coakley, the state’s attorney
general, has maintained her frontrunner position in the Massachusetts
governor’s race with the latest poll showing her beating Republican
Charlie Baker in a hypothetical matchup.
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| Gail Bangert getting her questions answered at selectman Ed Mc Manus House Party for Martha! |
Coakley
was favorable to 53 percent of the 503 registered voters surveyed by
MassINC in mid-January, edging Gov. Deval Patrick’s 52 percent
favorability and beating Baker’s 32 percent favorability and that of her
nearest Democratic rival, Steven Grossman, the state treasurer, whose
favorability was 22 percent.
Nearly everyone has heard of Coakley, who lost a
U.S. Senate race to Scott Brown in 2010, and all but 15 percent said
they have a positive or negative impression of her.
"Voters
know that Martha has fought for them on key issues that they care about
but what they look at is action and not polls,” Coakley campaign
manager Tim Foley said in a statement. “That is why Martha is focused on
building a strong grassroots campaign, meeting as many voters as
possible in every corner of the state, and talking about her goal to
create a more prosperous and fairer Commonwealth."
With
28 percent of voters viewing Coakley unfavorably, she was second only
to Patrick, whose un-favorability clocked in at 38 percent. Neither
Baker nor Grossman cracked 15 percent in the unfavorable column, and the
rest of the governor’s race candidates were largely unknown to the poll
takers.
Baker, the 2010 Republican nominee,
bested all the other Democrats in hypothetical matchups, a change from
an early October Western New England University poll that showed
Grossman beating Baker 43-30 percent. The latest poll had Baker besting
Grossman 33-23 percent.
"I am confident that
once the people of Massachusetts know me as the only lifelong
progressive job creator in this field, we win the primary and go on to
defeat Charlie Baker in November,” Grossman said in a statement.
Baker
also started to close the gap with Coakley, losing by 39-29 percent in
the latest poll compared to 54-34 percent in the October poll. The
former state budget chief and health insurance industry executive was
more widely known in the latest poll too, after 56 percent of
respondents to the Western New England poll said they didn’t know Baker.
"While this is the start of a long race and
only one of many polls to come, it appears Charlie's positive vision and
record of hands-on leadership is starting to resonate with voters,”
Baker spokesman Tim Buckley said in a statement.
UMass
Boston political science professor Maurice Cunningham said the poll
indicates voters have not faulted Coakley for her stumbles, including
campaign finance irregularities that prompted the state Republican Party
to launch a complaint with the Federal Election Commission.
“It’s
a testament to name recognition and how little the public pays
attention to things that obsess [us] political types,” Cunningham said.
“More depends on what’s going on in those caucuses.”
Democratic
caucuses begin Feb. 8, and the election of delegates will be a key for
the three lesser known candidates to win 15 percent of the vote in the
June nominating convention, a threshold they must achieve to secure a
place on the fall ballot.
“I think all three
of those lesser known Democrats are pretty good,” Cunningham said. “For
any of them, it’s a really steep hill.”
The
Republican caucuses began Jan. 11. Mark Fisher, a Shrewsbury Republican,
is seeking to challenge the better known Baker on the GOP primary
ballot.
Just ahead of Patrick’s fiscal year
2015 budget filing, the poll commissioned by Boston National Public
Radio station WBUR found the voting public divided on Patrick’s handling
of the Annie Dookhan state crime lab debacle, the Department of
Children and Families’ failure to monitor the whereabouts of a
now-missing 5-year-old boy, and a botched rollout of the state’s new
Health Connector website.
Now into his eighth
and final year, Patrick received a 53-39 percent approval rating, in
general. The majority of respondents said they were following the
Department of Children and Families and Dookhan stories, while about
half the respondents said they were monitoring the Health Connector
story not closely or not at all.
Overall, 46
percent of the respondents believed the state is going in the right
direction, while 38 percent believe it’s on the wrong track. Democrats
made up 36 percent of the respondents and Republicans made up 11
percent. The margin of error was 4.4 percent, and the respondents were
81 percent white, with 34 percent receiving a high school degree or less
education, and 43 percent completing college or reporting an advanced
degree.
People who viewed Baker favorably
were split on their view of the state’s direction, while people who
favored Grossman and Coakley were generally in favor of the direction of
the state. Baker ran squarely against Patrick in 2010 with his slogan
of “had enough” and has said he will run a more “enthusiastic” campaign
this time around.
Both Coakley and Grossman
received some cross-party support, with a little more than 25 percent of
people from the opposing party reporting a favorable view of them.
Grossman received 8 percent favorability from Republican respondents.
After
the big three candidates, independent candidate and investor Jeff
McCormick had the next-highest favorability rating at 9 percent.
Democrats Joe Avellone, Don Berwick and Juliette Kayyem, along with
Fisher, a Republican, and independent Evan Falchuk did not crack 5
percent favorability. Nearly all of the other candidates are unknown to
at least 75 percent of voters.
Kayyem, a
former Boston Globe columnist and homeland security official, had the
highest recognition at about 26 percent, while Berwick, President Barack
Obama’s acting chief of Medicare and Medicaid, was known by fewer than
10 percent of the voters surveyed. At Democratic events, Berwick has
noted that conservative pundit Glenn Beck called him “the second most
dangerous man in America.”
As the
Massachusetts Gaming Commission embarks on the final stages of licensing
a slot parlor and casinos in western and eastern Massachusetts, the
respondents were 53-39 in favor of the 2011 law, which allows for up to
three casinos in three different regions.
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