The Patriots are beloved across New England, but nowhere quite as much as Massachusetts, where the Super Bowl-bound team plays its home games. The liberal bastion of blueblood Democrats also loves its senators — or at least it once did.
A new poll from Boston’s NPR affiliate shows that nearly half of voters don’t like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who set herself up as a potential 2020 candidate by aligning with Hillary Clinton and smacking down Sen. Bernie Sanders every chance she got.
While just more than half (51 percent) view the combative senator favorably, only 44 percent think she “deserves re-election” — and 46 percent Warren ought to “give someone else a chance,” according to the WBUR survey.
So how bad are the numbers? Let’s let Steve Koczela, president of The MassINC Polling Group, which conducts surveys for WBUR, sum it up. “No one’s going to look at a 44 percent re-elect number and think that that’s a good number. No one’s going to look at it being close to even between ‘re-elect’ and ‘give someone else a chance’ and think that that’s reassuring.”
But wait, it gets worse. While Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 3-1 margin in Massachusetts, the state’s governor — a Republican — is viewed favorably by 59 percent of the residents, a whopping eight points higher than Warren. And still worse, three out of five Democrats view the GOP guv favorably, while only about one in 10 Republicans like Warren.
Again, Koczela sums it up perfectly. “When you look at Elizabeth Warren’s favorables, only 12 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of her,” he told WBUR. “When you look at Baker, 60 percent of Democrats view him favorably. So he has bipartisan appeal where Elizabeth Warren really never has.”
During her 2012 campaign, Warren vowed to be bipartisan and put petty partisan politics behind her. After she defeated Republican Scott Brown by about 200,000 votes out of 3 million cast, she said in a CBS interview: “I understand that there was a message for people who voted for Senator Brown. I think a lot of them were saying, ‘you’ve got to be willing to reach across the aisle.’ I want them to know I heard that loud and clear, and it’s what I want to do – I don’t want to go to Washington to be able to say, ‘whoa, I’m a senator.’ I want to go to Washington because I want to help get something done.”
But she has been perhaps the most partisan liberal Democrat in the Senate since assuming office in 2013. Now, She pledges to obstruct Donald Trump as often as she can and, after a contentious confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos, Warren even refused to shake the Education Secretary nominee’s hand.
For Warren, 2020 is a long way off. She’ll have to survive 2018 in her home state, and with these numbers, that prospect is no sure bet.