Obama Trying to Save Massachussetts

With the political winds at the back of Republican Scott Brown, pollsters tracking the Massachusetts Senate race are skeptical that President Obama’s Boston rally on Sunday will be enough to put Democrat Martha Coakley over the top.

Her supporters are holding on to the hope that Obama’s appearance, along with the wave of reports about Brown’s surging poll numbers, will inspire Democrats who’ve been cool to Coakley and the race until now to turn out at the polls to back her.

Given the state’s leftward tilt – it last elected a Republican senator in 1972, and Democrats outnumber Republicans by about three-to-one – that could avert a stunning Democratic loss of a seat that seemed safe as recently as two weeks ago.

“A lot of people don’t even realize there is an election on Tuesday to fill the unexpired term of Ted Kennedy,” Obama says in a robocall that state voters began receiving Friday. “They don’t realize why it’s so important.”

David Paleologos, the director of the Political Research Center at Boston's Suffolk University, said Obama’s visit was “less about persuasion – just one percent of voters are still undecided – and more about inspiration,” making sure Democrats voters disinterested in the race or cool to Coakley head to the polls.

But so far it’s been Brown who’s benefited from turning the election into a referendum on the president’s policies. He’s based much of his campaign on a promise to stop Obama’s health plan, since his win would leave Democrats one vote shy of the 60 needed to stop a filibuster, while Coakley has vowed to pass it.

According to a Suffolk University poll released Thursday—the first to show Brown in the lead—55 percent of Bay Staters have a favorable view of Obama .

But only 48 percent approve of the job he’s doing and just 36 percent like his signature health care bill. Brown’s late jump in the polls has been pushed by independents – who make up just over half the electorate in Massachusetts, where they’re allowed to vote in party primaries – and Republicans fired up by their opposition to the president’s health plan. - Politico Story