Brown, who is running to win his first full 6-year term in the U.S. Senate, edged the consumer advocate 49 percent to 44 percent, according to the Democratic leaning Public Policy Polling.
Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren and Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown. More politics news
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Republican vice presidential pick Paul Ryan made his New England debut this week, rallying more than 4,300 people at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire.Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown is holding a five-point lead over his Democratic rival Elizabeth Warren in a new Public Policy Polling survey released on Tuesday.
Brown, who is running to win his first full six-year term in the U.S. Senate, edged the consumer advocate 49 percent to 44 percent, according to the Democratic leaning organization.
In a June poll by PPP and another conducted by Western New England University's Polling Institute in conjunction with The Republican and MassLive.com, the candidates were statistically tied.
Brown's lead, according to the results of the PPP survey, can be attributed to the fact that he's shored up Republican support, cut into Warren's Democratic support, and maintained support from independent voters, which make up nearly half of the electorate in Massachusetts.
According to Dean Debnam, president of Public Policy Polling, as well as other political strategists consulted recently by The Republican, Warren must continue to leverage Democratic control of the Senate as dependent on her victory and chip away at Brown's image as an independent-minded Republican.
“Scott Brown’s been able to hold up his image as a moderate and that has him in a good position right now,” Debnam said in a press release. “Democrats will have to convince voters who like him to vote against him anyway to keep the Senate from going Republican.”
The debate in the race this week has centered on women's issues due in large part to U.S. Rep. and Senate hopeful Todd Akin, R-Mo., making comments about a woman's body physically preventing pregnancy when she is a victim of a "legitimate rape" as part of his argument against abortion, under any circumstance.
Brown and Warren have joined their party colleagues across the country in pushing their views on the topic to win over women, who statistically have a good chance of swaying the results in the Massachusetts Senate race considering they make up 51.6 percent of the Bay State population, according to the latest U.S. Census figures.
While both candidates denounced Akin's statements, Warren has cited other Republican stances against abortion, even in the case of rape, to paint Republicans as out of touch with women.
At the same time, Brown has taken bold steps to break party ranks on the issue, even going as far as writing the chairman of the Republican National Committee to ask that he consider Brown's "pro-choice" views when considering the GOP's official 2012 platform.
The survey, which was finishing up before the controversy over Akin's comments made international headlines on Sunday, concluded that Brown's job approval rating climbed modestly from 51 percent in June to 53 percent while Warren's favorability rating dipped slightly from 47 percent to 46 percent.
In the general horse race question, eight percent of those polled signaled they were still undecided, a margin large enough to sway the race in either candidate's favor.
As far as voter perceptions of the candidates' ideologies is concerned, 41 percent of those surveyed said they see Warren as too liberal with 30 percent saying Brown is too conservative. The participant's opinions about the two major political parties were split, with 56 percent saying the GOP is too conservative and 45 percent saying the Democratic Party is too liberal.
The automated phone survey of 1,115 likely Massachusetts voters was conducted between Aug. 16 and 19, and holds a 2.9 percent margin of error, according to the polling institute.