It's the last big push ahead of next Tuesday's primary here in Massachusetts, the first local election in the pandemic. The Massachusetts Senate race is the most closely watched among the campaigns and many are saying it's "too close to call." But Suffolk University is out with new numbers showing a break in that race. Morning Edition host Joe Mathieu was joined by David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, to discuss the latest findings. The following transcript has been edited for clarity.
Joe Mathieu: Good morning David, welcome back. Your poll this morning is showing good news for the Markey campaign, a reversal from your poll in March.
David Paleologos: You know, we when we first pulled this race back in September of 2019, Joe Kennedy had a 14-point lead. That was last year. And then, as you say, back in March, our polls showed a closer race. It was Kennedy by six. This is Markey winning by 10 points, 51 to 41. When you include leaners.
Mathieu: That's a 10 point gap. That's a huge change.
Paleologos: It's a big gap. It's outside the margin of error. So, you know, as a pollster, when you release a poll a week before an election, it's risky. Markey's over 50 percent, he's 10 points ahead and there were only eight points of undecideds left. So he's certainly well positioned.
Now, this is an unprecedented election. You've got so many people who cast ballots. We don't know really who has cast ballots, what demographics. We can kind of judge that a little bit by the polling. And we've, more importantly, we don't know who voted on Tuesday and how big the turnout will be.
Mathieu: There's so much unknown. The whole mail-in aspect, the pandemic aspect of this, David, has changed everything from the candidate's ability to go door to door, to retail politic over the summer to to have rallies, of course, not just here, but all over the country, and for us to just have a sense of what's going on.
Paleologos: Yeah, and often a tap into your core demographics, too. Because we know from the polling that the Markey voter tends to be higher income, higher educated, located in suburban and rural areas where there are more progressive activists, and the Kennedy voter is a different voter. Kennedy voter, much stronger among persons of color, much stronger among lower income and lower education and even casual voters. So it's a tough place to be for Joe Kennedy to have to pull out people who are casual voters and independents who don't normally vote in a primary. But it certainly could happen. And, you know, with a good field operation, the margin here could slide, higher or lower than what we're showing. And it's always, as I say, it's only a snapshot in time. To me, Markey, these numbers looks pretty well positioned.
Mathieu: David, of course, has covered a lot of these races and knows how things don't always turn out the way we expect. But we should know, by the way, in terms of methodology, David, you talked to 500 registered voters, but this is a poll of likely Democratic primary voters. Correct?
Paleologos: That's right. And most of the voters had indicated to us that they were very likely to vote or had already voted.
Mathieu: That's what I want to talk about.
Paleologos: That's an important metric to follow, because when you look at the people who have already voted, Markey, as you know, is getting 62 percent of those voters. Now, you know, those voters also line up demographically with people who are in the suburbs into the rural areas. What we know from the data is that the most of the people who are lagging behind in terms of turnout, which is most of the cities who are lagging behind in the turnout, are larger cities. So, you know, Boston, Springfield, Worcester, and those are Kennedy strongholds. So if there's a large turnout and if he were to generate a large turnout in those cities, certainly the margin will change and potentially the whole game changes.
Mathieu: What I'd like to ask you as well about mail-in voting is just a huge part of this story. And you ask people about that, how they chose to vote. Can you tell us more about what you found?
Paleologos: Sure. You know, unlike any other Massachusetts election you've got almost half of people who are saying that they are going to vote or have already voted by mail. That's a large number. I mean, when you think about the percentage of absentee ballots in any election here in Massachusetts, it might be in the single digits, high single digits, maybe low double digits. But now we're talking about half the ballots. And my hat goes off to the city and town clerks who who might be out there listening right now because they're probably looking at bins of mail and voters stacked high in their small offices, trying to trying to figure out how to process all these. When you're from some of the bigger area of not even the Bostons and, you know, the Springfields where they have bigger offices. But some of these small town hall offices are very small and they have to process all of these and do it in an orderly way and then to ensure that every city and town makes sure that their count is fair and accurate.
Mathieu: Forty-six percent told you they've already voted. David, how do you how do you gauge a race when that many people have already gone to the polls?
Paleologos: Well, that's 46 percent of the 46 percent. So that's about half of the half. OK. A quarter of the votes is still a big number. I mean, my understanding is that this from the secretary's offices is that a half a million or so, maybe 600,000 people have voted, which would put the turnout very, very high. But I also believe that many people don't want to deal with the process of going from being sanitized and standing in line. So if that if most of the people have already voted and the turnouts. Seven hundred thousand or a million, then you know, that makes it even more dire for Kennedy because we know the many of the early voters have already voted for Markey.
