MA-SEN: Scott Brown leads by 8

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

And again, the campaign hasn't even started yet. Brown loses once he's actually called out on his votes, which aren't all that different than that of the leadership. I recall people saying that Charles Djou and Joseph Cao would win re-election to their house seats and we see how that turned out.

Yes, this is certainly more reasonable than just saying that all of these polls are junk (even though most of them are junk). Warren got a bounce once she started campaigning. That bounce has faded and now Brown is ahead a few points or so (hardly 'dominating', krazen, which is your own oddly sexualized term for Republican incumbents leading by single digits under fifty per cent and nobody else's, nor do you seem to use it in any other situation) because of his anodyne image. It's incredibly easy to tie Brown to the Senate Republican leadership later on and not all that difficult to tie him to Romney to boot. He is edging Warren at a low ebb of interest in the race eight months out and that fact is not going to make us start running around like chickens with our heads cut off. It's still possible for him to win in the end but the state Republican Party here is actually pretty desperate, and to the best of my knowledge this specific round of polling hasn't done much to mollify them.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

I, at least, am not making excuses.

You, however, are making excuses for trash polls (actually, no, you're not even bothering to, you're just insulting us for pointing out that they're trash). The only non-trash poll out of this race recently is the Rasmussen, which should be almost as much to your liking as the rest of them, so why not just go with that one and stop trying to get us to accept polls with questionable crosstabs, leading questions, etc.?

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

I, at least, am not making excuses.

You, however, are making excuses for trash polls (actually, no, you're not even bothering to, you're just insulting us for pointing out that they're trash). The only non-trash poll out of this race recently is the Rasmussen, which should be almost as much to your liking as the rest of them, so why not just go with that one and stop trying to get us to accept polls with questionable crosstabs, leading questions, etc.?

Well, when the line 'junk poll!' is tossed out with such frequency its very difficult to observe which polls are acceptable. At least other than those that show the Democratic party in the lead.

Indeed, some polls that show Obama winning solidly while the companion Senate Candidate is losing are considered 'excellent polls!' for the former, but 'junk poll!' for the latter. But they are the same poll!

For this race, for instance, certain people have concocted into their mind that Scott Brown cannot win 20% of the Democratic vote, despite numerous polls showing so. One would venture to say that after a while the polls are correct and the people might just be wrong.

I'm skeptical of this because I'm a Massachusetts Democrat. I'm not denying that these polls are reasonable approximations of the current state of the race but I think that because of the peculiarities of my state they have even less predictive value for eight months from now than some polls in other states or Presidential polls, which is already low.

For future reference, don't use uni polls unless they're in partnership with someone or something else, polls that ask leading questions, or polls that have crosstabs that instinctively strike politically cognizant members of the crosstabs in question as unlikely to hold or downright bizarre, and you should be fine. Most of the polls that showed Warren leading a couple of months ago were actually not great polls either, so you should be if anything happy about this.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

As it stands, Scott Brown is clearly angling for culturally and socially conservative working-class voters who often feel alienated by the Democratic liberal establishment.

I understand that that's what he's doing, and that it might be working at the moment (I'm of the 'unlikely to hold' school of thought on this strategy rather than the 'downright bizarre' school because of the different optics of a Presidential, non-Republican-wave year in this state) but I've always been baffled by how he was able to get away with that two years ago because the Democratic establishment in Massachusetts isn't actually particularly interested in cultural and social liberalism. Then again, I've never understood large amounts of the 'image' that the Massachusetts Democratic Party apparently has, particularly in places that are not Massachusetts, or why cultural obsessions would all else being equal (and Warren is at least as working-class and folksy as Brown is, in terms of actual background) trump the fact that somebody is a moronic empty suit who can't be trusted to even know how sociological issues work much less what to do about them. He's not a Rockefeller Republican so much as he is a Dewey one with shades of the weird hybrid aw-shucks school that Brian Dubie is also part of for God knows what reason.